Joe Getty (27:58)
Gutfeld, the mean boy in high school. So speaking of attitudes, we're supposed to hold you remember when we were supposed to take seriously for about 90 seconds the idea that. Oh, no good. Jeans, jeans, blue jeans. Jeans with blue eyes. White supremacy, eugenics. These people, oh my God. Gosh, they're so nuts. And here's the key. So few people actually agree with them. So we're talking last segment about preference falsification and I'll describe to you exactly what it is. This is a great description from Glenn Reynolds, who's a professor of law at University of Tennessee, one of those Southern universities where people are flocking now because everybody realizes, oh, they like teach you stuff there and don't just indoctrinate you into being a good Marxist like the Ivy League. Anyway, so here's his description of a preference falsification. It's a move usually practiced by authoritarian regimes, but now democracies are catching onto it. The trick is you make citizens pretend that they believe what the government says or what the powers that be say. He's talking about immigration in Britain, and so the government is the correct target. We're talking about education, so it's more the administration, the professors and stuff. But anyway, the trick is they make citizens pretend they believe what the administration says and fake their approval of what it does. You'd promote marches and demonstrations and speech in favor of the preferred positions. And you severely punish marches and demonstrations and speech that oppose those favored positions. You give excuses like stopping, you know, racism or fighting hate speech for shutting down any opposition. You may even have informers that ferret out wrong thinking. Report it to the authorities or to employers or to third parties who will engage in extralegal harassment. If you do it right, you can have upward of 90% of your population hating you and your policies, but doing and saying nothing about them. Because everyone in the 90% thinks they're part of a tiny minority. Resistance will seem futile. This works. Until it doesn't. The problem with preference falsification is that sooner or later, some event or development can make people realize that what they've been told is popular is, in fact, very unpopular. When this happens, as Duke University scholar Tamir Koran writes in his book Private Truths, Public Lies, the result is a preference cascade. When let's when a large swath of the population realizes their dissident views are in fact widely held, they become less afraid of the government or the administration or the professors or the media, and less hesitant about sharing their true sentiments. And then everybody realizes all of a sudden, oh, my gosh, not only have I not been in a tiny minority all the way, all the time I've been in the the strong majority. And by the way, we're right. And my prayer is that this is going to happen at some point in the American educational system. Although, my gosh, they've got the teachers, they got the faculty, they got the administration, and they're bullying the kids. To wit, really interesting piece in the Hill by a couple of guys, the researchers Forrest Rom and Kevin Waldman. On today's college campuses, students are not maturing, they're managing. Beneath the facade of progressive slogans and institutional virtue signaling lies a quiet psychological crisis driven by the demands of ideological Conformity. I first read the write up on this from an opinion writer in the Wall Street Journal. I'm very pleased to see this is in the Hill, which is a very mainstream left leaning because, you know, their readership is people who work in Washington D.C. generally in government or lobbyists and all who depend on government. And that crowd tends to be left leaning. Obviously they like more big government. So the fact that this is being published in the Hill and has gotten a bit of attention is very encouraging. Anyway, so here's the story. Between 2023 and 2025, these guys conducted about 1500 confidential interviews with undergrads, couple of universities, Northwestern and University of Michigan. We were not studying politics, we were studying development. Our question was clinical, not political. Quote what happens to identity formation, which is part of becoming an adult? Who am I? What do I believe? Right? What happens to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy? Instead of painstakingly trying to understand the world and coming to a set of beliefs, instead you're just told you need to adhere to this point of view. What happens to identity formation? We asked, have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed socially or academically? You want to know what percentage said yes? 88%. 88% said they pretended to hold more progressive views than they truly endorse to succeed socially or academically. These students were not cynical, but adaptive. In a campus environment where grades, leadership and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe. The result is not conviction or beliefs, but compliance. And beneath that compliance, something vital is lost. Quoting now from the authors, Late adolescence and early adulthood represent a narrow and non replicable developmental window. It's during this stage that individuals begin the lifelong work of integrating personal experiences with inherited values, forming the foundations of moral reasoning, internal coherence and emotional resilience. Oh my gosh. Emotional resilience.
