Peter Boghossian

 

Here are my notes--written about a televised interview which I watched, with some slight content modification or rewording by me for the sake of clarity or continuity of thought—on a 1/2/24 interview between Professor Peter Boghossian (an ex-professor who taught at Portland University that resigned in 2021 to protest how students were being indoctrinated) and interviewer, Marissa Streit, CEO of PragerU.

 

Here are her introductory written remarks: “Peter Boghossian says we should burn the university system to the ground. Peter B. taught at Portland State University until how he saw DEI turned our education system into social justice factories where grievance and division were the only outputs.”

 

My response: It is obvious that Academia is filled with true-believing ideologues out to indoctrinate, brainwash and mind-control our young people into being reduced to being myrmidon zealots whose only purpose in life is to pedal the message of cultural Marxism, their mass movement that they are bringing to US and the world.

 

Traditionally American campuses sponsored student high academic standards and excellence, under which criterion students as individuals excelled, and their meritocratic output grew our technology, science, economy, and civilization.

 

This has all been replaced with woke expectations: groupthink, utter conformity, true-believing and social justice activism are the targets, and they produce grievance and division—meant to and will lead to civil unrest and revolution if not checked immediately. Meritocracy is out, no longer do academics demand from students, intellectual excellence, and innovation. Altruism is the morality of true believers, and poor academically performing social activists are what we taxpayers are funding.

 

M (For Marissa): “We disagree on some issues, and then find common ground on some things like the fact that our educational institutions need to be abandoned and started over. Professor, I am happy you are here. You want to know why: on some things we disagree, but we agree on one thing: having conversations and civil discourse. To pursue truth. We may not come to the same conclusions but sitting down and conversing is really important, so thank you for coming.”

 

P (For Peter): “I want to add to that list. Correct me if I am wrong. Truth and freedom of speech—these are core principles. We also agree on the idea of cognitive liberty. I don’t want to impose my belief or lack of belief on you or vices versa. I do not want the state to impose. I want to hold freely the beliefs that I have, without being told, forced, or cajoled into a belief.”

 

My response: These stances by both participants are consistent with American ideals of free thinking and free speech; I love Peter’s definition of free speech as cognitive liberty, he is correct. How can one think rationally, creatively, realistically, and originally if one’s words or concepts or one’s perspective on the world are inhibited by any external person or force?

 

I would argue that without radical free speech, free thought and radical commitment to allowing other individuating  supercitizens to speak, think, act and vote as they alone chose, then we are not a free people.

 

M: “Some people of your background as we discussed are afraid to be associated with PragerU. They are afraid to be labeled with whatever lies and labels I have been labeled with.”

 

P: “Right.”

 

M: “I am called a white Christian nationalist, those intolerant ideologues. You are not afraid to associate with us. The Left is creating division and conquering the conversation.”

 

P: “Correct.”

 

M: “We leave it to chance to talk it out where we disagree, but we may come up with an agreement. Does this make sense?”

 

My response: The Left does gaslight us all the time, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, right and wrong, good, and evil. If they can scare, stampede, and push a panicked state upon the frightened, upset, frustrated masses into joining their mass movement, the creating division and shutting down free speech, public debate, and courteous discourse, pays big dividends for them.

 

The Left owns most of media, so they gaslight the masses into what to think and believe. The masses still enjoy being lied to, being told how to think and live, being controlled, so the abdication of the duty for each member of the public to be strong-minded, publicly engaged and difficult to browbeat, makes it easy for Leftists and totalitarian types of all stripes to hold sway.

 

P: “They attempt to intimidate you and me. It is guilt by association.”

 

My response: We will know that we have made it, have succeeded at becoming an upper middle-class majority of individuating supercitizens, once any altruist smear to attribute to rival groups or independent individuals, the trait of guilt by association or worth by association, then falls on deaf ears. Guilt or worth is only attributable to each individual, and, if the evaluations are credible, he has merited these labels. His group affiliations are absolutely irrelevant. No one deserves a reputation based solely upon his associations.

 

P: “We become contaminated, discredited, because we are on the right. That is also an excuse not to do the intellectual work that you need to do to come up with a decision. They do this rather than looking at the evidence and coming up with a decision.”

 

M: “I agree completely. Tell us about yourself. I came across your name through my friend James Lindsay. He has been on this show before. I know you resigned as a professor and had written a powerful letter of resignation.”

 

P: “I am Peter Boghossian. I did my dissertation if prisons. I attempted to increase the moral reasoning of inmates to help them desist on their journey of crime. I was actively involved in epistemology which is how you know what you know. I taught for many years at a former university which I subsequently resigned from. I travel around the world. I have a non-profit: National Progress Alliance. We try to promote civil discourse. I promote street epistemology to facilitate conversations among people who disagree. You mentioned James Lindsay. He is the co-author of the book.”

 

My response: The book by them is How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Practical Guide. I will get that book and do some assessment of it, since such a guide to civil discourse would serve to improve communicating among citizens as the moderate ethics of conversing is strengthened when citizens can say anything to each other in utter honesty, without us going to blows, rioting in the streets, looting, burning, or taking up arms against each other.

 

P: “We did the grievance study in 2018 to expose corruption in academic scholarship. I resigned in 2021 and here I am talking to you.”

 

M: “Why did you resign?”

 

P: “I resigned because I couldn’t do what the university hired me to do which is to teach critical thinking and reasoning. I also resigned because we were doing an injustice to the students. Students are not being taught to think honestly and openly about certain issues. They’re being forwarded certain moral conclusions, certain ideas about the world, certain ideologies by people that are hellbent, absolutely convinced they have the right answers to moral questions.”

 

My response: When intellectuals, men of words and academics, are true believers championing their adopted ideology (cultural Marxism), they seek to shut down debate and independent questioning among students, so that the students and masses can be herded into the camp of followers, as this clerisy anticipates the imminent arrival of their much sought-after, totalitarian new order.

 

P: “It is doing the students a disservice. I couldn’t teach the way I wanted to. For example, why would someone vote for Trump (I did not vote for Trump.)? Even mentioning that question is seen as outrageous. He is seen as racist, bigoted, and homophobic.”

 

M: “A professor can be ruined just by bringing it up.”

 

P: “Yes, just bringing it up or trying to understand another position. The goal is not to understand. It is indoctrination. Replicate that ideology. Find oppression, remediate oppression. Give the students the skills of critical consciousness so that they can go forth. Remember, there are certain assumptions here:

1.     Racism is the everyday state of affairs.

2.     Disparity in outcome is due to systems.

3.     Patriarchy and heteronormativity are oppressor groups.”

 

My response: Let me refute these three assumptions.

 

Assumption 1: Racism is only an everyday state-of-affairs where naturally racist and evil humans are allowed to act upon this tendency. Being racist is exacerbated as the masses are  socially reinforced in their prejudice against those that are outsiders and from rival tribes or races. Altruist/collectivist morality, group-living, group rivalry and warring, group-identifying, group-pride, and acceptance of nonindividuating per adult are all social constructions that make rabid, virulent existent racism not only existent, but inevitable and increasing in menace and scope.

 

Assumption 2: Disparity in outcome in terms of per capita wealth and educational accomplishment is due to personal failure to maverize, and no system can keep a determined individuating good woman down and back for very long, when she is hell-bent to push them aside.

 

Assumption 3: Patriarchy and heteronormativity exist but are not much relevant. Were children raised to be individuating supercitizens as a population, no system could hold them down or back for very long. They would just push aside their elitists oppressors.

 

P: “That set of assumptions are what the (academic) institutions want to forward to students and get them to believe in. This is ubiquitous in America, and it is spreading to Eastern Europe and through-out the English-speaking world.”

 

M: “My background is education, so I have known this for a while. Education is seen through a Marxist lens. Education has been Marxified. When there did you still hope to make it better? You seem like an optimistic person.”

 

My response: If we are living right, we believe in a good deity and are working assiduously to serve that good deity, be our morality altruistic or egoistic. We are to be optimistic and fight on until we die, no matter if things are working out or not.

 

Dennis Prager wisely said some years ago that the bigger the institution, the smaller the individual. That is correct. Academia, the army, legacy media, government on any level, large corporations, educational institutions, and religious denominations are inherently corrupt. The bigger they get, the more corrupt they get, and because they suppress individuals and individualism, they are evil institutions.

 

At best, if kept small, decentralized and of limited size, scope and share of the GDP, they can become not too oppressive or too corrupt. Where institutions are entrenched and hierarchical, the economy is socialist, plus the government is authoritarian, an elite rules the masses in a caste system, and suffering and malevolence are maximized.

 

When the intellectuals become disenfranchised or were never brought into the existing dispensation, they form the nucleus of a mass movement, a revolution to overthrow the status quo. They profess their compassion for the masses and that they fight and die overturn unjust, rotten elites, but power is their actual if unstated motive. They only seek to rule the masses in person, once the replacement dispensation comes online.

 

Lives of nonindividuating, masochistic endurance of being bullied, and a desire to be told what to do are all factors and motivators utilized by the masses to conspire with the elites that seek to bind and hurt them. Better an abused slave than living on one’s own and making one’s own tough choices that God one day makes one answer for—even the oppressed must answer to God one day for being willing to be oppressed, being willing to live in slavery and pain rather than rebel and be tortured or shot.

 

Considering this, Peter and Marissa and other optimistic conservatives can hope to reform and rescue institutions, but the reform at best is temporary—perhaps lasting 20 years, because human nature is what it is, and only masses individuating can withstand the march of elites and the institutions that they rule and corrupt, all in the name of utopian perfection.

 

P: “I knew I couldn’t change it. That university was at the very center of wokeness (Portland), with all the craziness and madness.

 

By figuring out what was going on I had a little preview of what was to come. I realized it was an imperviousness to evidence and reason, a way of looking at a problem as if you had the conclusion already, and you work back to the problem.”

 

My response: It is dangerous and delusional to assume that you can change the mind of the fanatic, the true believer. All you can do is oppose them, for compromise or appeasement with such zealots will open the door to you being utterly defeated by them. They live the life of the lie, and they are without mercy or scruples.

 

P: “We know people are trapped in the wrong body and that people can be micro-aggressed, and that trigger warnings might occur. We work backwards from these conclusions to justify the thing we already believe. The whole institution has been captured and it is extraordinary.”

 

M: “It is happening everywhere, not just Portland.”

 

P: “It is all over US and we are exporting it, a neocolonial export on the part of Americans. We no longer export the values of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and equal treatment under the law, respecting Miranda rights and due process.

 

We have very specific ideas about race, power, power dynamics, oppression, the problem of overthrowing systems in democratic institutions, and why they have to be leveled.”

 

M: “For the first time I am not proud to be an American.”

 

P: “We are the problem. Not only are we the problem but you cannot understand the problem unless you look through the lens of education in the universities. You cannot understand that problem unless you study teacher training programs. That is the wellspring. We indoctrinate generations of students. We export those ideas. Equity as opposed to equality.”

 

My response: What a turn-around: when American conservatives are ashamed to be Americans, and American Leftist stances are the most radical in the world, and even shock Europeans introduced to them.

 

M: “About your resignation letter from the University because it and other campuses were transformed from being institutions of free inquiry and free thinking, transformed into factories for social justice, race, gender and victimhood. Its only output is grievance and division.”

 

P: “I stand by that.”

 

M: “Would you give examples?”

 

P: “To understand why this is happening you have to understand the architecture of the system. To get tenure which is a job for life, you need to publish. There is a deep-seated rot or corruption in academic journals which only publish the right views. The problem with that is those who publish in the journals are more likely to get jobs for life. Those that don’t publish in those journals, and can’t get published in humanity journals, can’t get tenure. Those that get published then run these journals will only accept similar viewpoints, so the journals are now an ideological echo chamber.

 

Then these professors teach those articles to kids in their classes. This is how you weave in the indoctrination. My friend John McWhorter has this wonderful book, Woke Racism. To fight wokeism, you must realize that is it not a religious movement: you do not need faith—you just need to point to the evidence.”

 

My response: Peter is very sharp, but he is clueless on this point. Woke racism or cultural Marxism is just that, a pseudo-religion of true believers in this postmodernist mass movement, and they are pressing to take over the world by spreading their ideology/ism everywhere. Peter and his ilk can be as reasonable and point to the counter-evidence against their claims all that he wants to—and he should—but these people are unyielding, impervious to his superior arguments, and they are proud of it. Decent, sensible, non-ideologized Americans need to fight back hard and unrelentingly to stop these zealots in their tracks, and Peter does not realize how serious and unbending they actually are.

 

P: “If you present a viewpoint not in line with these journals you chance of being published is virtually zero.”

 

My response: I have long been blocked by someone, and this conspiracy against me is to disable me from reaching potential public followers who might like what I communicate in my books or on my blog site. I wonder who has deplatformed me, to shut me away from the public, to grind me down and silence me forever.

 

M: “Where is this coming from? What you are describing is the destruction of our institutions.”

 

P: “Yes, willful destruction.”

 

M: “You can have bogus nonsense, peer-reviewed papers brought into universities and fed to brainwashed kids.”

 

P: “It is not that it is nonsense. It very much makes sense. These things are exposed, and the best book on this is James Lindsay’s Cynical Theories (My note: Lindsay wrote a book in 2020: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.). It sold 500,000 copies but was deliberately left off the New York Times bestseller list.

 

Lindsay traces the genealogy from postmodernist French intellectuals and their applied postmodernism, explaining how to mediate the power structures. Now we have generations of people that have gone to college and were indoctrinated by ideologues. It is perpetuated by professors that cannot be extirpated because these people have jobs for life. It is not even the raison detr’e of the institution, just the view of some with an oppression variable in their backgrounds, and in equity-based institutions, they are guaranteed to have positions of power.”

 

M: “You say universities exist to create division among Americans. All are playing victim bingo.”

 

P: “It is a little more complicated than that. Take Harvard that has been in the news lately. If it just took the top 10% of Asian Americans and whites, the admissions would be 50% Asian, and white would be 30%. Hispanic enrollment would plummet and blacks would be .9% of students.

 

What is the goal of the institution? To find truth or serve people whose ancestors have been oppressed to give them opportunities and positions of authority like President Gay of Harvard University?

 

The university’s purpose once was to push scholarship, academic excellence, but now has shifted to providing students with a race-based, gender-based lens, teaching people to see all as constant oppression, and to discharge their moral impulses. They see themselves as victims and that view bubbles up in their own story.”

 

M: “I wanted to ask you about that. What is the goal of our current universities to help people understand? What is happening right now? They are setting up an oppression Olympics, and many of these Presidents are making this their job. President Gay plagiarized. Many of her colleagues want to keep her in her position, which is a kind of racism.”

 

P: “I want Gay kept to show the corruption of universities. Do not fire her.”

 

M: “Can our universities be saved?”

 

P: “Absolutely not. They have jobs for life. They have manufactured bodies of literature totally untethered from reality. The university is not salvageable. These bodies of literature are corrupt. The raison detr’e of universities has been perverted, run by individuals that are ideologues that do not teach the truth. DEI is now the whole university architecture, and is based on hunting down people that do not agree with the narrative—especially on race and gender. Why try to save them—support other institutions like the University of Austin.”

 

My response: The taxpayers should defund universities until they straighten up.

 

M: “You tried to save it.”

 

P: “Burn it to the ground. Why save an institution that teaches people a false view of reality? Go to trade school or just lay in a field and stare at the sky. Why go to an institution that teaches false things?”

 

M: “Our universities are not fond of reality.”

 

P: “We should talk about that. That is sad. In any realistic combat, social theory is a corrective mechanism, a way to test your ideas quickly, tested against an opponent that does not like to lose.

 

In Academia the corrective mechanism has been removed.”

 

My response: When Peter laments that the corrective mechanism in Academia has been removed, he is highlighting that the Administration and faculty has a monopoly and power and say. Because they are drunk with power, their altruistic lust to mind-rape their students is intentional, practiced and a couple of generations along now. Weak-willed students, taught by parents and society to go with the group and live altruistic, nonindividuating lives of being enslaved and to like it or at least accept subjugation, are ripe for the picking when they pass through the portals of Academia.

 

 Going forward, for all institutions of all kinds, each individuators must recognize and act upon the realization that the only corrective mechanism that works against abusive, rotten elites running all our institutions is the presence of individuated supercitizens at all levels of any institution. They will set the institution right or burn it to the ground and replace with viable, smaller streamlined institutions. It is mostly the individual that counts, not the institution, not his group affiliations.

 

P: “Debate has been removed. For the record I prefer conversations over debate. The woke have removed all discourse and dialogue, no more challenging or questioning—they are seen as epistemic violence. Title IX has been used on campus against common sense and is using the law against you.”

 

My response: We must reject any talk of unsettling or challenging talk as epistemic violence, made illegal to be prosecuted by policing authority. Free speech is the substrate of a just, free society, and touch it not at all.

 

I agree that conversation rather than debate and arguing is ideal, but let the exchanges continue and unfold with the stated mutual agreement and expectation that rational, desensitized-to-taking-superficial-offense, moderate adults can say anything to anyone without anyone getting angry or raising their voices, or threating violence anyone disagreeing with or offending them.

 

M: “Talk about Title IX.”

 

P: “If you violate the moral orthodoxy, they weaponized Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and the federal law against you, when you fail to toe the party line, they can come for you. There are bias response teams, and people can file anonymous complaints about you. This bypasses the traditional university architecture and goes right to the President. It is a theft of your time. It just takes time to fight off and it is very stressful. I was told I could not comment on protected classes nor teach in a way that my opinions about protected classes could be known. There are entire departments whose mission is to forward ideas about race and gender. You cannot talk about gender or protected classes, and you cannot question the status quo.

 

If we can’t ask questions, we will have moral demagogues that come in with answers. We will not have ways to think about problems—there will be no moral infrastructure so that we can deal with problems. We must ask questions. The teacher provides students literature to represent his view, but if it is avoiding reality, that is a recipe for discord. This is a profound disservice to students, not educating them.”

 

M: “People are penalized for thinking freely.”

 

P: “ Title IX is weaponized against all. DEI is now the truth, and to question it is a microaggression. You have harmed people—you are doing violence to people, it is extraordinary.”

 

M: “Extraordinary and scary.”

 

P: “Your 11 year-old son will be okay. We hope by the time that he goes to college there will be new robust institutions that are not ideologically captured.”

 

My response: Whether a mass movement for groupist peoples is dormant within the functioning dispensation, or it is a time of change and upheaval where the frustrated masses are awakened and agitated to the extent that the mass movement goes hot and active to overthrow the existing order, it remains that these institutions are captured by ideologues worshiping group religion or narratives, usually sacred but now often godless and secular, but these are false religions and we have to get people maverized and worshiping good deities as individuators. That will result in keeping institutions from being captured and radicalized by groupist ideologues and their followers.

 

M: “In these dark times you see hope?”

 

P: “Americans are waking up and speaking out against wokeness. Mutilating a child’s genitals is wrong, and the trans-theory wokeness is exposed, a lot of people are on to it. The Me-Too movement—believe all women. Really? Defund the police, a uniquely idiotic belief. Abolish prisons. People now do not trust institutions. People graduate from the Academy and take these dangerous, divisive ideas with them.”

 

M: “People do not trust institutions and regard them as captured by money or outside adversaries. Can you trust an equity hire versus a merit-based hire?”

 

P: “People no longer trust institutions. They should not trust them, for they are not worthy of the people’s trust.”

 

My response: We need to trust the masses as individuated supercitizens in a federal society of small, well-run institutions, and we should neve put much trust into institutions or elites for there are corruptible and attack the masses sooner or later.

 

M: “Do we not send our kids to college? You started a college but there is no spot for millions of students.”

 

P: “Send your kids to trade school. Colleges are pushing views that we know are false.”

 

My response: We have to think long run and beyond the current dilemma whether to send kids to college, to trade school or to let them just go work in our free market economy. They can do any combination of the above which works for them and is their chosen personal preference. As we raise a generation of individuating supercitizens, one explicit assumption—which most maverizers will consciously recognize, assent to and practice—is that life is a life-long learning process to grow in knowledge, personal power, effectiveness, good character, creativity, skill and wisdom, no matter if or how one is credentialed. The institutions mean little: the track record of lived and produced intellectual products of one’s maverizing is what counts.

 

M: “I am glad I pushed you on this question.”