Bret Weinstein

There's a very big difference between people deciding to absent themselves from a shared space in order to make a point, which I support, and people deciding to absent somebody else, which I'm absolutely opposed to.

Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen.

Evergreen is arguably the most radical college in the country - and while it does lean far to the left in a political sense, it is the school's pedagogical structure to which I refer. Rather than placing students in many separate classes, most of our curriculum is integrated into full-time programs that may run the entire academic year.

Equality of outcome is a discredited concept, failing on both logical and historical grounds, as anyone knows who has studied the misery of the 20th century.

Terrorism is a tactic in which the primary objective is to produce fear, rather than direct harm. Terrorist attacks are, first and foremost, psychological operations designed to alter behavior amongst the terrorized in a way that the actors believe will serve them.

The 9/11 attack was symbolic. It was not designed to cripple us economically or militarily, at least not directly. It was designed to provoke a reaction.

Terrorists do not engage in terror attacks because they are strong. They engage in these attacks because they are weak.

We are not made safe from terrorists by helicopters, or missiles or boots on the ground. Nor is it drones, torture or digital dragnets that protect us. What makes us as individuals safe from a terror attack is the staggering probability that we will be elsewhere when one occurs.

To women, Americans of color, and the citizens of the world, Donald Trump, if he is taken at his word, represents a threat to you all.

On a college campus, one's right to speak - or to be - must never be based on skin color.

The idea that we should prioritize a racial viewpoint on, who knows, maybe even organic chemistry, over somebody who is adept at understanding how to convey a difficult concept, is preposterous, just at an educational level.

If one's desire for change is an earnest desire to see things improve, then surely there is a state in which things have been improved to the point where you would hope to conserve a structure rather than alter it. At that point, you become a conservative.

Conservatives tend to be very skeptical of change. When something could be improved, they often get in the way of those improvements because they fear the unintended consequence perhaps more than they should.

There was a time when the term liberal had been so thoroughly demonized by those on the right that I remember consciously choosing to call myself a progressive in order to evade the stigma. But there was no change in my perspective that accompanied it.

I hear many people talking as if the terms liberal, progressive and leftist refer to different factions, and that one might partner with one and reject another. I have been on the left my entire adult life. I never have seen clean distinctions drawn between these things.

Colleges have to be about discovering what we don't yet know and that process will come to a screeching halt if we are leveling threats of bias over the way people phrase things.

Belief systems have flourished because they have facilitated the interests of the creatures involved.

Despite the fact that human beings think that they have escaped the evolutionary paradigm, they've done nothing of the kind, and so we should expect the belief systems that people hold to mirror the evolutionary interests that people have.

What we do have is a system in which power tends to be awarded to people on the basis that they are corruptible.

When I talk about 'apolitical' or 'nonpartisan' change, I mean first and foremost exploring root causes with due seriousness and at least agreeing on what they are.

The electorate is starved for honest debate and for the good governance that follows from it.

So many of our institutions have been overtaken by schools of thought, which are inherently a dead end.

On a college campus, people should be equally free to be on campus, irrespective of their skin color.

Is there a free speech crisis on college campuses? One can certainly make that argument, but that portrayal is at least as misleading as it is informative.

What is occurring on college campuses is about power and control - speech is impeded as a last resort, used when people fail to self-censor in response to a threat of crippling stigma and the destruction of their capacity to earn.