Greg Lukianoff

Part of the ideology that is dominant right now kind of treats almost 70% of the American public like they're, we developed this a little bit in The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, like they're to some way illegitimate and not worthy of respect or compassion.

And what's funny is the elitism has been repackaged as a kind of... It masquerades as kind of infinite compassion.

That essentially it's based in a sort of very...

To be frank, overly simple ideology and an oversimple explanation of the world and breaking people into groups and judging people on how oppressed they are on the intersection of their various identities.

And it came to that, I think, initially with an appeal from a compassionate core, but it gets used in a way that can be very cruel, very dismissive, compassionless, and allows you to not take seriously most of your fellow human beings.

Yeah.

So the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that's been developed by,

on the left to not ever get to someone's actual argument.

I want to make a chart, like a flow chart of this about like, here's the argument and here is this perfect fortress that will deflect you every time from getting to the argument.

And I started to notice this certainly when I was in law school, that there were lots of different ways you could dismiss people.

And perfect rhetorical fortress, step one,

And I can attest to this because I was guilty of this as well, that you can dismiss people if you can argue that they're conservative.

They don't have to be conservative to be clear.

You just have to say that they are.

So I never read Thomas Sowell because he was a right winger.

I didn't read Camille Paglia because someone had convinced me she was a right-winger.

There were lots of authors that – and when I was in law school, among a lot of very bright people, it really was already an intellectual habit that if you could designate something conservative, then you didn't really have to think about it very much anymore or take it particularly seriously.

That's a childish way of arguing.

But nonetheless, I engaged in it.

It was a common tactic.