voiceover: this is bbc news. we'll have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. the western liberal tradition prizes intellectual freedom, tolerance and the power of reason. from academia to politics, there's supposed to be a shared commitment to fact—finding and good—faith debate. well, that's the theory. what about reality? well, my guest today, peter boghossian, is a philosopher who quit his us university post claiming academia had been corrupted by "woke ideology" and a grievance culture. he's now a leading figure in an anti—woke movement

gaining political traction. but is he stoking a dangerous culture war? peter boghossian, welcome to hardtalk. i think we have to begin with that word �*woke'. it is so widely used now. i am mindful that its origins in the united states were amongst the black community who insisted, demanded that people should wake up, get woke to injustice. now, that's a positive. you invest the word with a great deal of negativity — why? it's not that i invest the word with a great deal of negativity.

it's that it's become a catchword. we can use other words. helen pluckrose from — the author of cynical theories called it... a british writer and academic. exactly, exactly. ..called it "critical socialjustice," people — maajid nawaz, also from here, has called it regressive leftism, wesley yang calls it the successor ideology. so it's an ideology that goes by different names, but it basically means the same thing. there's a suite of conclusions around which it cohers. so, for example, the author ibram x kendi, says that any disparity in outcome is due to a system. so, system is the cause of the disparity. robin diangelo, another bestselling author, says it's not if racism occurred, but how it occurred. so, woke in itself is a way to think about the world in a general orientation towards social reality. the analysis you allude to is about the way in which so many problems to do with lack ofjustice, as they would see it,

problems are to do with systems and structures... that's correct. ..and can't be addressed simply by looking at the behaviour of individuals. do you not accept that? no, no, that's correct. let's linger on that for a second, because that's really important. so you could have an entire system in which nobody was a racist, but the system itself would be racist. so you can have a conspiracy without any conspirators. so, again, getting back to the idea of disparity, it's the belief that systems themselves are fundamentally problematic, and if you want to fight for racial justice, for example, you have to go after the system. so, when it comes to you using the word woke, you have taken a word that you know was used to indicate that black people wanted others to wake up to the injustice they suffered, and you now take pride in using it, as you would say, amongst other words too, it indicate something deeply negative.

isn't that in itself a choice you have made to use the word �*woke' in a way which signals that you don't care about the way other people use the word? many people still think that it is very important and good to be woke. oh, i care very much about how people use the word, and that's why i use the word in the way that i do. but for the interview, if you'd like to use critical socialjustice, we can use that as a placeholder. so the word �*woke' itself and, again, there are kernels of truth within the ideology that are extremely important. there have been egregious examples of injustice, and the word �*woke', the umbrella has expanded from racial issues to gender issues to trans issues, etc. but, yeah, it's a deliberate and conscious choice that i use. you. . .i recognised just then

that there are still huge issues, for example, with race in your home country, america. correct, absolutely. if you look at the record in terms of incarceration rates... 100%. ..in terms of the numbers of prisoners on death row, for example, a whole different set of data would tell you, as a guest on this show not so long ago, bryan stevenson, the human rights lawyer in the united states, would say that in the end there is something systemic and structural about the way in which racism still works in america. would you not accept that? no, i don't. can you give me a single example of a law currently in place that is systemically racist against a certain group of people? can you tell me that you think the laws are implemented in a way that is completely without prejudice and discrimination by the judiciary, by the police service... 0k. ..by all those in authority in the united states of america? sure, i'll answer your question, but... so the answer to that is no. so, usually when you think about systems, you think about...

there's an intrinsic bias in a system, usually a legal bias or usually... and so i don't — i cannot think of a single example, and i go around the world and the united states and i ask people, and i've yet to have one, and i... look, let me give you what you're looking for. i think that we have very serious problems with race in our country, much less so with gender, but very serious problems with race. i think we need to have open and honest conversations about this. the remedy to this, however, is not, as i mentioned before — the bestselling author, as ibram x kendi says, "the remedy to past discrimination "is not present discrimination. " yeah, he would refute that. we've had him on the show. he says absolutely what he is about is treating people equally, seeing people treated equally in a society. well, if you read the book stamped in which he uses that line, that's absolutely not what he says because he advocates for equity.

an equity—based system is not the same as an equality—based system. in an equality—based system, we treat people the same. in an equity—based system, we treat people in terms of outcomes. we try to jerry—rig the system for certain outcomes. and if somebody has oppression variables in one's past, then we... yeah, i guess he would say that you need equity to get to equality. but let's get stuck on others who are not in this studio to discuss it with us. ok, but... let's stick to you and me, and let's stick to your case. this is extremely important because this is the essence of — if we can both agree, which we — i assume you do, that there are disparities in incarceration rates, to use your example. is the solution an equity—based solution to discriminate against people, for example, white heterosexual male, to try to remediate those injustices? i don't think the answer is yes. i think that the answer is equality, that we need to give every american an education of the first rate. i think we need to look at reasons that — and if you want to look at it in a systems—based way, i have no problem with that. you've just used a phrase

that's very important. you just said you want to help educate americans. correct. now, you were a trained academic — you are a trained academic. you had a position in the philosophy department at portland state university. correct. and you chose, in the end, to leave it. correct. and you said at the time... you said that you regarded your university as an ideological community, it had been captured by ideology. you said, "i can no longer work here, i don't fit the mould." correct. you think your own university had been utterly corrupted, do you? completely ideologically captured. and on what basis do you say that? well, the senate had passed certain resolutions about criticising critical race theory, i'm absolutely... is it more to do with the fact that the university had actually censored you, found you to have violated two different sets... three. three? yeah. ..three different ways you'd violated the code of your university. ok, so those are two

separate issues. one is, what evidence do i have with the fact that the university has been ideologically captured, and then the grievance studies where we submitted the fake papers and... and we'd need to explain a little bit about the fake papers, because it's a part of your academic story. yeah, please. i don't want to put words into your mouth, but you seem, over years, to have become more and more disillusioned with what you saw as the sort of progressive woke capture, intellectual capture of your university... correct. ..and you decided to expose it. along with a couple of others, you launched a hoax project in which you wrote a series of academic papers aimed at different humanities journals — which are all peer reviewed, all academic — and you filled these papers with absolute nonsense — fake research, fake data. you did it over a year or so. morally reprehensible conclusions like leashing men like we leash dogs, other things that are particularly vulgar that deal with orifices that we can't talk about

on your show, and then those papers were accepted and... well, so, hang on, let's be very accurate, because it's important. go ahead. i think you wrote, between the three of you, up to 20 papers... correct. ..seven of which, ultimately, were peer reviewed and appeared in journals. correct. and then we got caught by the wall streetjournal and exposed before we had a chance to... ..for the other papers to go through. now, you claim that what you did exposed the intellectual vacuity of this captured university progressive mentality, right? not exactly. not...if it were merely vacuous, it wouldn't be that much of a problem, but it forwarded certain conclusions that were not based in rigorous epistemology, that were moral... as alan sokal, who said — who's from the original sokal project, who now lives here in london — it forwarded morally fashionable conclusions, and so we played to those morally fashionable conclusions. butjust on the research misconduct — i want to talk about that quickly.

so among the charges — i think you'll like this, stephen — among the charges they brought me up on, they brought me up on plagiarism. they said that i plagiarised adolf hitler's mein kampf. it was true, i did plagiarise adolf hitler's mein kampf. i admitted in testimony, in a sworn committee, that i plagiarised adolf hitler's mein kampf, the very charge they brought me up on, and then they found me innocent. chuckles and what they did — one of the things that they got you for, in terms of violations, was not getting prior approval for running what was called a human experiment, because, in essence, you were putting on trial... that's correct. ..the academics who do the peer reviewing and run these journals. instead of saying, wow, we have people in charge of peer—reviewed journals, why did you publish this? like, why did you publish data that was simply impossible... this data was utterly impossible. and so instead of asking them to defend that, they said that it was unethical because those —

the journal editors themselves were human subjects. yeah — but you see, the wider point is that you didn't do this project in a way that really made your findings and your conclusions valid. you didn't, for example, try to fake some paper for an economicsjournal or for a chemistry or a science journal to see whether it wasn't so much that there was a problem here with the ideology of the humanities departments you were trying to expose, but maybe there was a different problem, that peer review as a system is collapsing in many universities and journals, that there aren't enough academics who want to seriously do peer review and that the standards are slipping across the board. you can't know whether that's the right conclusion because you didn't do a control. you know — again, to mention helen pluckrose, she has a great response to that. to say that your neighbour has a problem with cockroaches in their house does not demean the fact that you have rats in your house.

so i'm not saying that... in fact, i will say there's something in psychology called the replication crisis where 50%, half of papers and studies can't be replicated. the problem is that there's a corruption in scholarship in certain fields of literature, and that corruption is not only affecting institutional policy in the united states, but it's getting out into public policies. so we're making public policies around morally fashionable nonfalsifiable conclusions. but isn't there another problem with the way you are trying to expose it? that is, you are saying that these woke people who are running our universities, particularly our humanities departments right now, they have a preconceived set of ideas, and all they want from research is for it to reinforce their ideas. but don't you also now have a set of pre—formed ideas? you hate this woke culture and you launched this project of yours specifically to undermine the woke culture. you, therefore, had your own

set of preordained conclusions that you were going to reach come what may. well, first of all, that's demonstrably false because we released the studies. if we had published no papers, we would have said we published no papers. but if you mean by that, that i adhere to certain principles that are intrinsic to the enlightenment tradition, that i believe are indispensable for the functioning of civil society, then the answer is yes. i believe in free speech, i believe in open enquiry, i believe that people should have a cognitive liberty to believe what they want without an authoritarianism or a — particularly in the university context. so, yeah, i do have my own set of principles. but those aren't conclusions. those are processes of open discourse and free enquiry. you pride yourself because you have written a book on it, on how to have difficult, sometimes you call it impossible conversations with people you disagree with. right. to do that you have to have

some kind of sympathy and willingness to listen to the other side. 100%. it seems like you are losing that in certain fields. for examples, universities across the united states are very committed to this diversity, equity and inclusion programme. they want to see it expanded in their different academic fields and departments. you say this. you say, "you can either have free speech at university "or you can have a diversity, equity "and inclusion programme. "it is literally impossible to have both." correct, i stand by that statement. so where's your willingness to have a little nuance, a little grey area between the black and the white? i think that is a false dichotomy, respectfully. i don't think it's a question of nuance. it gets back to karl popper's 1945 paradox of tolerance. we have ideologues in institutional positions whose sole purpose is to limit the speech of certain individuals and to, to make it more difficult for people to speak openly and honestly and for sincere inquirers to ask questions.

and so the question is — what kind of institution, what is the purpose of the university, what kind of institutions do we want to have? and i think that it's pretty clear to me we should have truth—based institutions. jonathan haidt, the social psychologist at nyu says you either have social justice institutions or you have truth—based institutions. let's broaden this out beyond the field of universities and the campus, let's talk about society and culture as a whole. you appear to be saying there is some sort of free—speech crisis. that people like you with your message about what is happening in culture are being censored, no—platformed, that your voice is somehow being controlled, restricted diminished. i see absolutely no evidence of that. no, let's clarify that. i have a very large platform. i don't feel, i'm sitting talking to you here right now. how censored could i be? i'm extremely fortunate in that i have a platform and i operate independently.

ijust interviewed a guy at ucf in florida, charles negy was his name. a professor of psychology, in the same conversation society, this would not matter at all, but he was hispanic, he was gay, he had all the impression variables, they came for him and they fired him. he did not have a platform. there were so many people who have been marginalised orjust afraid to speak out. and i think that... you said you wanted to broaden... no, go ahead. the point is surely that there is freedom of expression but some people in operating that freedom of expression seem to think they have a right to avoid the pushback that might come after their free expression. a lot of things that people like you then complain about, the pushback, the protest, isn't that part of the job? if you choose to take a stand on these sorts of issues shouldn't you respect the right of people to stand up to and say no, this guy's

got it plain wrong. of course. anybody should do that in a functioning civil society. people should be encouraged to do that. in fact, not only can you do that... but you've got to take the responsibility. you should be encouraged to do that. i just want to be clear about something. we are talking about an ideology that does not participate in the same rules of discourse and engagement. so, for example, blowing air horns at events or conferences or interrupting speakers or de—platforming speakers, this is not the counter to individuals, what we should be doing is encouraging exactly what you just said, if you want to protest, great. are you saying you in your professional life has suffered, what, intimidation, threats, worse? physical violence, spit on, constant harassment. but it's not about me it's about the kind of society we want to have and the kind of institutions we want to have and the fact we need to construct institutions and bodies of literature that we can trust. right now in the us and the anglosphere have a legitimacy crisis, habermas coined the term.

we have a crisis of confidence in our institutions, people do not trust the peer review, people do not trust experts. tom nicholls wrote a great book, the death of expertise, we need experts to have a functioning society, we have to have experts. your political bedfellows in the us and internationally are not people who rely on experts and evidence and facts and truth telling, they are people who it seems rely a great deal on populism, and on selling messages around nationalism, and fear mongering. you should invite them on and have that? i have a north star and that's truth. you have a north start and that's true. crosstalk viktor orban in hungary, you've taken a fellowship at one of orban's universities. are you going to let me speak? people do not know this. they don't know the extend to which you in your last year have committed to a defence of viktor orban's hungary, saying it is a place where you think freedom is very

real, very genuine and you take money from a university which is funded by orban's government. that does not seem to sit easily with your own self—description as an avowed liberal academic? because viktor orban, if he is known for anything, is known for his proclamation that he is an illiberal politician. 0k. what i was going to say and i will still say it because it applies before you mentioned viktor orban, i am happy to talk about that, you said some of my bedfellows, if somebody, a former writing partner, somebody with whom i have other substantive disagreements, if they say something, if they want to take plastic out of the ocean and i think that is a good idea i will say yes, i agree with you. i don't think that this is a political thing, i don't think the axis are relative terms of liberal and conservative anymore, the more accurate is authoritarian and non— authoritarian. but we'll bracket that and go to orban now. i took a senior fellowship

position at mcc in budapest, in hungary. and for people who don't know it, it's a foundation financed to the tune of more than $1 billion by viktor orban's government. and i would do it again and i had an amazing time. my position there, i went around the country, the carpathian basin, and i spoke about, quote, literally anything i wanted to speak about. but you also as a very well—informed individual know his government closed down a university in budapest, the central university. do you know what he did that? i have interviewed the president of that university so i know pretty well. i have spent time in hungary and know how orban is running politics in hungary. i am not ignorant of hungary and neither are you? the point is, your core principle, you said to me in the course of this interview was commitment to liberal freedoms? you cannot tell me, you cannot look me in the eye and you think that viktor orban is committed to your brand of liberal freedom, can you?

here is the way that i look at the viktor orban administration and the way i look at my role. when i was in hungary i had totalfreedom to talk about and do about, do anything i want. when i was there, my first day, excuse me, my first interview there, i was told, when i was told, you can talk about anything you want, he said i'm an atheist, he said even atheism, you can go around and talk about atheism. in my experience, yes, i got to talk about my passions, i would do it again, that does not mean i am a supporter of viktor orban's government, it means i was, i was in a country that i spoke about things, about my passions, the socratic method, having impossible conversations and i would do it again. sadly we are almost out of time. ijust want to end with one, big final thought.

whether it is the us or hungary, what we see are societies where there an increasing inability of people at different political extremes to talk to each other, to connect and communicate effectively. correct. you've spent a lot of time as a philosopher trying to understand how people can better do that. correct. do you believe you have found a way that people can bridge those huge gulfs, and can avoid the sorts of clashes which we now define as a deepening culture war? i do. we go around the world and we do something called spectrum street epistemology, i coined in my first book. it's how to have civil conversations. we put lines of tape on the sidewalk, we go around the world and do that. and we ask people if the belief they have corresponds to the evidence, their confidence in the evidence. for example, it is strongly disagreed slightly disagree, neutral and on the other side, we will ask a question, should trans women women be in women's sport? and they start on the neutral and go to a line and then i ask them questions, rooted in the socratic method, i did not discover this, it has been around for 2&00

years, i have augmented it. that's very interesting but we are out of time. this is the last one. from what you see you have faith we human beings, in the end, will tend towards finding common ground, rather than fighting each other, or not? i don't have faith in that, i have confidence we have the tools to enable people to live more sane, more rational lives but they have to want it. peter boghossian, it has been a pleasure having you on hardtalk. thank you very much indeed. a pleasure.

hello there. thursday was a better day for play at wimbledon and for the start of the test at headingley. there was quite a lot of cloud generally, but we did see temperatures peaking at 23 degrees. however, into friday, we're tapping into some heat and humidity, and temperatures may well peak as high as 29 celsius, 84 fahrenheit. there was some cloud and rain around, though, and you can see quite clearly where i'm talking about on the satellite picture. this is a frontal system bringing some wet weather, fairly showery first thing friday morning across scotland and northern ireland. slowly brightening up into the afternoon. but with that southerly wind direction dragging in that warm, humid air as we go through the day, producing gin—clear skies across england and wales, temperatures will respond. highs of 29 celsius in one or two areas by the middle of the afternoon. so that means for the tennis at wimbledon, we could see temperatures as high as 27. it has the potential to be the best or the hottest day of this season's championship.

and it'll be similar story as well for the men's ashes. thunderstorms perhaps threatening as we go through the weekend. as we go into friday evening, it will be a relatively quiet one. during the early hours of saturday, we've got this front pushing in from the south—west, but temperatures not falling very far. it's going to be a humid night, an uncomfortable nght for getting a good night's sleep, particularly in the south—east, as temperatures only as low as 18—19 celsius. and with that front continuing to move in from the south—west, bumping into that humid air, that has the potential to spark off some sharp, thundery downpours. they will drift their way steadily north and east, so saturday will not be a wash—out by any means. but if you do have outdoor plans, it's worth bearing in mind that there could be some interruptions with some sharp showers. top temperatures as we go through saturday still on the warm side at 20—21; degrees, maybe 27 across parts of east anglia and the south—east. need to keep a close eye on sunday. there's a risk of some really sharp, thundery downpours moving up

from france, butjust where they will appear is still subject to question so keep abreast of the forecast for the second half of the weekend. just to summarise then, our weekend is going to start off on a humid note. there will be some decent sunny spells around from time to time, but also the risk of some sharp, thundery downpours. take care.

live from london, this is bbc news. leader, yevgeny prigozhin, after saying he could be with teachers striking again over pay and conditions.