hello and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered i'm keenly bill how do you define the word reality something like this the state of things as they actually exist as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them to say the least this is a philosophical definition let's throw in politics now is there one political reality can and should one be enforced when this in the end produce a ministry of truth. discuss these issues and more i'm joined by my guest tom reilly and granted he is a contributor with real america's voice in austin we have daniel one of it he is

a professor of philosophy and human dimensions of organizations at the university of texas austin and in paris we have john laughlin he's a university lecturer in history and political philosophy all right tell me cross up rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i always appreciate it let's go to tom 1st you know and looking at what's been going on in the media and our politics during the election and since then it seems to me that there is an attack on diversity which of course this of these attacks on conservative opinions is in the name of having a more diverse political environment but actually it's creating diverse they want the reverse they want to have a monopoly of speech here and you know we've heard terms like him from a reality czar and a reality stars people writing about it with a straight face i mean out with any form of irony whatsoever so if the people that

are talking about diversity of opinions actually want the opposite go ahead though that's absolutely right essentially what's going on now they want to really control information so that they can control the debate and we've seen that the what happened journal 2020 alexion with you know president trump against joe biden and what we saw was you know organizations like twitter in force their view of reality and that ended up with them preventing and spiking does new york post story about the hunter biden's laptop the american people were denied a lot of information about bite and the family because gets involved. and that's sort of determining what's reality and what's not we're only going to see more of that it's about control of public opinion and that's what they wanted to you know get danielle one of the things that's i find very very interesting is that it seems to me it leads logically speaking. the cutting out of the other voices and

primarily conservatives but progressiveness well let's be fair here my sense is that these people just don't have any arguments some don't want to have a debate because and having a debate legitimizes your interlocutor they want he d. legitimize their interlocutor along with the idea you can't have any you can have a functioning public square if you want happenings loose of society if you play it out we go ahead you know. think that's exactly right it is surprising to me actually that on some of these issues on the integrity of the election for example or on various therapies for over 19 or a variety of other questions there seems to be no actual willing to make the case. on that side instead people simply denounce their opponents as conspiracy theorists or worse and it is somewhat baffling if you think shit was a fair election presumably you would welcome inquiries into it if you think that

you know this is really a medical fact about covert 19 you would welcome any stories and you would lay out the medical facts and i found that instead of people simply perspired with insults ad hominem. thing that i've been stressing to people throughout any of these topics is always go to the primary sources you have to read the papers in the medical journals because you won't get a fair count of the in the media you have to do the same with various selections sources with all sorts of topics and often you find that the report that's given in the media to the extent that there's any appeal to argument at all is really simplistic and one sided and often just getting basic things wrong that's not what the paper says that they're reporting on and so forth so so i agree it's shocking the extent to which people resort to insults not really as a last resort but as a 1st resort and only action bother to make their case and john people that are

leading the charge are journalists jim and most of them obviously we would see them coming from late the last being liberals and they're demanding that made sense or other journalists and other people on these my arms and it's coming from them and of course you have the democratic party likes this because of course no one what they would prefer us to know that diverse segment. we have a secretary treasurer of the treasury a woman now instead of talking about her involvement maybe and in the recent turmoil. on the stock market here i mean it's always going to shipping us away from is what daniel said you know what are the facts here we can't even talk about bad go ahead you know well but your finger on a very important element in this which is as you say the role of journalists i mean it's bad enough when governments try to restrict free speech and debate but indeed

what is characteristic of recent times is that journalists by and large are what we call the mainstream journalists no longer act on behalf of their readers and the general public to question the state but instead act on behalf of the state to question and discredit their readers in the general public so someone mentioned the world upside down a minute ago that's one of the best examples i think what is we all understand i totally agree with the previous speakers that this council culture has extended way beyond it was already bad enough in politics but in the 2020 it's extended as the previous speaker just said in 2 issues of debate about medicines the french newspaper of record low moment classified as fake news for a while before are dropping it the. only just in ma say who was the 1st to talk about hydroxy chloroquine he was courageous questions fake news that's

a medical debate does this medicine work or doesn't it it's absolutely not for a paper of record to brand such a thing as fake news and obviously the same applies to other areas including historical debate areas in which precisely you any get to the truth by exchanging views being closed down but i think what is very frightening almost more than these habits which of grown up. is that of course this is all being done without any respect for the lol because when it is proposed to have festool obviously we know about twitter don't trump if donald trump had committed an offense the offense of incitement that might to merited some kind of punishment whether impeachment impeachment or some kind of criminal conviction but it doesn't merit being banished from twitter before any judicial procedure and still less punished for life and the

notion of the realities in other words of someone in the government is not someone in the judicial system not a judge not someone acting under the law as someone acting presumably with the freedom that comes with the executive. such a personal such an office should be in charge of policing fake news is absolutely crazy but i'm afraid we live in crazy times like it's happened in the past ok in other countries and it's only a river of tears ok let me go back to tom i mean it's been mentioned we can look at the situation and donald trump a private citizen donald trump is facing right now is that you know in looking at these proceedings against him is 2nd impeachment what are the facts that happened on january 6th what happened and we could because there's no one seems in the media seems to be particularly interested in what really happened and from what i know of what happened it was awful and people should be punished for breaking the law laws

that already exist laws that we don't need more of but that this is the basic point here is that if it was something done wrong let's talk about it what are our differences facts and we can decide what happened but it's not being done in the night on that very frustrating someone is being put on trial without the facts being presented i mean if this isn't a perversion of our our collective tradition of hundreds of years i don't know what it's going no. it certainly isn't much summed a major facts that are being overlooked right now in the senate is the fact that the law enforcement in washington d.c. were warned by a branch of the f.b.i. that there was going to be violence they sent that information forward as well as the new york police department so the real question is if you want to avoid this in the future where did that information go white in law enforcement act on it and it turns up you know really promoting propaganda i mean the video that the democrats

showed in the senate trial yesterday was it was appalling there was no time to say if they cut out the line where president trump said march peacefully and patriotically they cut that part out and they really just produced the hollywood version of propaganda to drive their mesh their agenda and that's exactly what would happen if the government u.s. government had this ministry of truth it would be nonstop propaganda to support the policies of the politicians in power. daniel one of the things that you know when i look at this and it is an extension of academia this this toxin came from academia and now he's in the general culture and willing things to be true i mean don't believe your lying eyes ok but you know you think they might if it's like this over it's almost 8 it is a spiritual kind of thing of healing the truth on people and if you don't accept i mean it's a cult if you don't race it not only are you would

a pos date you must be disappeared i mean this is extremely this is very very extreme and again the intent is to destroy the public square not only to control it go ahead. yes i blame the frankfurt school and i could be mia does have to really plead guilty for this because we've harbored and freely nourished that encourage for more than half a century now a group of people who believe in mark uses doctrine of repressive tolerance. they see a moral imperative to not tolerate things even when they're true and they insist that if there's a concept of truth at all which they usually put in quotation marks or going to so-called truth or something but they also the ends of just so essentially say that's not a defense there are things that shouldn't be tolerated even if they're true for the sake of some political ideal and so it gives them

a justification for suppressing the truth in the name of their politics you know it's not very often on television people die by the praying principle but i'm very glad that if he brought up here because you're absolutely right and these ideas are there to see these are this is a political strategy and this isn't a philosophical exercise this is what bothers me about it i mean i found the frankfurt school to be clever at times and interesting and nuanced but it wasn't supposed to be a handbook towards power at least as i read it but that that's the case go ahead john last 40 seconds before going to the break well that reminds me of an exchange on which i can't remember the other the date of the speeches but that was an exchange between a journalist and a prominent neoconservative and i guess it must have been around the time of the iraq war and so the beginning of the 2 thousands and the journalist asked a question about something about reality and the new conservative whoever it was it was someone probably in the administration looked at him with great hostility and

come dissension and said ah he said i see you belong to the reality based community way he can in other words we in power we create our own reality won't own land in your a loser because you. you're stuck in reality where we're creating our own local it said that all right gentlemen i'm going to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on a reality these are state aren't.

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give us the link the study in the most minute let me get a feel good. solid and know if and when i might. see my name a few. welcome to cross talk where all things are considered i peter lavelle remind you we're talking about our realities are. ok let's go back to tom in greenwich i'm i try to stay away from hyperbole i really

do because there's so much of it you can see on cable and in the main broadsheets but what i have been seeing and it's something the media did as a reaction to don donald trump it goes further back but you can see this these certain benchmarks here what i see going on here is an ideology in short we call it neo liberalism. in the dramatic events we've had over the last few months this ideology wants to just completely dump in the enlightenment they want to pretend it didn't even how can. and with their with their resources. on the internet you can start cutting away of these things i mean certain books that are you know i mean when is the federalist papers going to be considered you know. a bad book and they're going to have a quote unquote a burning of that to here with the enlightenment is that touchstone of what you

know here i stand i can go i can do no other ok and there was a recognition of of protest of protected speech maybe didn't call it then that but there was that recognition they want to get rid of that no go ahead no they certainly do and that's very frightening globally i mean the point here is we advance society by having open and free discussion on any debate you can and it's my thought against your thought made a best man or women when based on the facts that's what's truly frightening the getting away from that and what are most disturbing things to me going on you know later. is the whole origin of the covert 19 virus was it naturally occurring or was it in accidental leap from the institute of uralla in that is a legitimate debate but if you go out there in a public square and you say i have evidence circumstantial as it's as it may be that it probably did leak from the lab they will shut you down even in the scientific community there are people who cannot really express that freely they

will be shut down really by kind of a new scientific mug and i find that frightening it's very anti science when you really boil it down yeah but daniel i mean if you know i don't want to open up a can of worms here in mentioning edward snowden or julian assange but what they exposed in different ways is how the state lice to the public ok where the journalists went that they were the ones that supposed to do that in our lifetime i'm looking at all of us here you know they're the ones that you know put a pressure on power now not always very well not always with great precision and some of these great investigative journalist became hacks later because they made a lot of money and got a lot of fame but there's there's no there's the there incurious to the intense the beginnings of infinite degree now in informing the public and no wonder people are

going to other places to get their information and there are bad actors out there that will feed bad information and intentionally how do you react to that go ahead . there is only right that what has happened to journalism schools and to the practice of journalism over the past few decades has really been appalling for one thing the best and the brightest don't tend to go into journalism the school of journalism is usually right down there sadly with the school of education the school social work in terms of the academic qualifications and so forth of the people who are there but secondly you look at what schools of journalism teach and it has almost nothing to do with any actual subject that the journalist is going to be covering it is a battle that isn't right very well excuse me but they can't even write very well these days i'm sorry keep going no you're absolutely right they don't teach writing they don't teach anything really and so people are covering science you have no background in science people are covering economics up no background in economics

who do not understand the 1st thing about what they're writing about and in addition to that they are indoctrinated with these attitudes about social justice and so forth that they bring into the profession and there is i think they're incapable of being objective even if they wanted to be because they don't have the skills so you've got this combination of incapacity and happiness to become a propaganda organ and it's a it's a really horrible combination you know john we have this perfect storm again going back what with mike rights against academia guy was in a media for a long time but you have these undergraduate degrees and now grads and agrees musically and social justice well they're all essentially useless degrees and they're very some are white expensive when the imbalance away now they're going to be dead per day or of equity and they will work for they need a reality czar they will be in a shock troops and a reality czar they found

a place for them because we see this all across the board where you're diversity people policing the. meeting language ok because again they have this notion which is completely enigmatical to our traditions of knowing the true job well i think you're both right but if you and peter and daniel to place the origin of the problem in philosophy on the one hand and in academia or on the other because this problem has been going on now of course it's reached a terrible intensity recently but it has been prepared at least a generation if not more so i mean daniel you mentioned the frankfurt school and i completely agree with that has a negative influence but i'm afraid there are schools of liberalism as well which very close to. the others i'm thinking of cultural talk built his career and he's you know he influenced george george soros saying that there was really no such

thing as truth and he went back as far as aristotle it was tacked aristotle to having come up with this crazy idea that there can be a real or of non-contradiction another another sort of primitive regressions as he saw it from the pre-socratic ideal and the result is of course that as you say the enlightenment which without i mean you know an enemy of it even if one is into a front f. an attic of the enlightenment you can see that the people were essentially optimistic and they were interested in truth you know the rest which is that is why indeed at one point during the black lives massive protests in britain somebody started to have a go at david hume you can i do think of a risky things simple thing and then him because apparently he'd let someone he lead someone to the money he was involved in slavery or some such rubbish but it is it is very very dangerous and very unpleasant because as we have seen with the.

destruction of liberties in the coronavirus pandemic a lot of this was in preparation for a long time all the scam mongering and not. about the virus but about other things like climate change and so on and now we have suddenly very unexpectedly found ourselves in a situation we were all more or less living in police states and unfortunately i think whereas before i might have said oh well none of this will matter you know because it'll never work and all the rest of it i'm afraid i'm not totally the opposite opinion we have now suddenly had to. liberties abolished at the stroke of a pen including very fun to mention ones and there is absolutely no reason at all why that should not extend to free speech and to free discussion precisely because of this i would say at least a generation of people who are now in power who have been brought up in the exactly the universities you mention so i'm straight i'm extremely i'm full of foreboding

about it oh i am too and i next question to all 3 of you will show much more bones about all this what if we don't agree as we're descending on this program not what is our bait because you know every single you know 8 used to be journalism where's where's the you know i'm trying to be ironic here was this a space or a protected space i hate using this lingo but you know now that journalists are not only on more but their favorite. house is they would have other journalists ok for questioning ok so what happens to people like us on this program and many of our viewers that say i won't submit i don't agree what's going to. one of the biggest rests that we face is really with souce the social media giants they can deep 5 form us and you in your program so the 3 of us could be talking to the 3 of us his whole going forward i think that's really one of the most frightening aspects of

all of this is the power of the social media giants to determine who gets their platforms and when and what they get to say and many of these 54. they have their own kind of ministries of truth and yet none of them have you know backgrounds in science really to figure out really what is right or wrong there was a time i was on newsmax t.v. i have a doctorate in biochemistry and i was talking about hydroxy chloroquine and maybe it does this was my point maybe it does that i got the platforms off of a you tube and i tried to say why and they wouldn't give me a real answer i was right down the middle didn't make a determination either way i just happened to mention that word and that topic so i think going forward the real risk is the really forming people isolating people in their own homes not being able to communicate with each other and i think part of that is what's going now with what they're trying to do with really silencing you know the some the 5000000 voters who voted for president trump in the last election

i think they're trying to separate those people from the president former president himself you know janja one of the epogen explained to me a number of by a number of people that i actually admire and respect. these some of these platforms they're a lot more or less willing to do this for me i'm censorship but there's and they're under enormous pressure from the left the left is putting the pressure on them to do this because most of them don't really care much about these issues we are a very small minority on these platforms we don't affect their bottom line whatsoever we can't compete with puppies and kittens there's no way ok no way throwing some sports and cooking and manicuring ok we can't compete because we're not part of their bottom line and that's why you know they'll say you know you get these you know the aoa season people like that you know that to put pressure on less and less ads ahead to get go and buy whatever they don't really care because it doesn't it doesn't affect their bottom line and that's what really bothers me because we can have an impact that way go ahead. well yeah i think that's right

it's it's pose a problem within say the united states where you write the puppies and kittens that cookie shows wind and anything intellectual is going to be doing extremely well to get you know maybe 100200000 views what other things are getting millions of views so it's trivial from that point of view and then add in china added other places where they have potentially or actually much larger audiences and where the government is in firm control of all speech and yes there's very little incentive for them to take freedom of speech seriously now in addition to that i think a lot of the people within the companies are social justice warriors that are happy to do it. and even those that art i've known a couple of people who have actually worked for google and for you tube censoring videos and they're they're nice people i don't think they're ideologues but on the

other hand i wouldn't trust them to feed my cats at the beach and i think the. thing about the in like myth and that's the name that's the scourge of our educational system that's all the time we have gentlemen want to thank my guests but it also and it bears what i think our viewers watching us here are d.c. and it's not a new member process not. a new gold rush is underway in guyana thousands of ill equipped workers are flocking to the gold fields hoping to strike it rich. out of their. homes that wherever children are torn between gold. was ready for i thought i was doing my best get back to see which side will have the strongest appeal.

join me every thursday on the alex simon show and i'll be speaking to guest of the world of politics or business i'm showbusiness i'll see you then. imagine picking up a future textbook on the early years of the 21st century what are the chapters called gun violence school shootings. first it was my job and it was my fear was my savings i have nothing i have nothing that is now i don't authorize aloof or resources i look for jobs i look for everything i can to make this house. in oil i'm doing is. the road to the american dream paved with good refugees it's this very idealized image of our america needs americans look past the debts that happen every single day this is a modern history of the usa america on r.t.

. this is art international with breaking news for you russia's foreign minister today warning moscow's ready to end its ties with the e.u. only if it slaps fresh sanctions on key sectors of the country's economy. we don't want to distance ourselves from the international community but we need to be ready for this if you want peace prepare to war. is another use member the world health organizations coded expert team just back from the virus at the center in china tells us is this cause the disease when it came to humans through other animals 1st . and french outrage grows so for american values being forced on the country as.