The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it. My advice to this body is to put the nation and its cor… - Bret Weinstein

I believe we have a very broken relationship, at least in the US but probably across the West, where we ask candidates for office about policies that they are going to enact. And it's like a reflex where we want them to tell us 'I'm going to do this this that you want' so they promise us stuff, it doesn't work, they don't have the power to enact it when they get in office or they never meant it in the first place. And we would be much better off, counterintuitive as this sounds, if we assessed their character and their patriotism instead of their policy proposals. My feelin is: I actually don't care what you think of policy. If you impress me, that you're a patriot, that you love the country that I'm a part of, that you want to see it improved, and that your values align with mine so that improved to you also means improved to me, then all I want to know is that you're good at evaluating what policies might get us there.

I stood up for three reasons. One... I felt an obligation to do it... it was the right thing to do. Two... manipulative bullies... Three, I thought that I was positioned to endure and repel the accusation that I absolutely knew was going to come back. Why did I think I was well positioned? ...I had tenure. I was well liked by students of every description, who knew me very well... and knew that I was not a bigot. I thought that would protect me. My own personal history was also completely inconsistent with the claim that I am a racist. ...I was wrong.

As far as the academy is concerned, these ideas are a direct threat to the ability of the academy to continue to teach. Because what we saw here, at Evergreen, was the descendants of critical theory challenged the right of students and faculty to engage in science. They actually confronted us as if science was just another mechanism of wielding power. And if they do that, if that happens across the country, collages and universities will not be the place where science happens. And science will continue, it will have to reformulate itself outside the collage and university system. And when it does that the justification for a collage and university system vanishes. Who's gonna send their kid to a collage that doesn't have science at its core? So anyway, I think this is actually a threat to the academy as a whole.