Cathy Young: Why Free Societies Need Free Speech
6/16/20261 hr 30 min
Cathy Young returns to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about free speech, institutional trust, and the strange incentives shaping public debate today. What happens when universities, media outlets, political movements, and online personalities trade careful thinking for moral certainty, tribal loyalty, or attention?
Michael and Cathy discuss the pressure to excuse bad ideas when they come from "your side," the rise of activist thinking in education and journalism, and the growing appeal of contrarian figures who seem to thrive on distrust.
They also get into the war in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Iran, isolationism, and why defending open inquiry matters most when it becomes inconvenient.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Cathy Young· Guest1:00
It does kind of morally offend me. The fact that Trump basically said to the people of Iran, "You stand up, you know, rebel against this dictatorship, we're gonna back you up," and a lot of people got- Yeah ... killed. I mean, there are estimates that- Yeah ... like 30,000 people were killed. Uh, I don't know how accurate that is.
Michael Shermer· Host1:16
Yeah.
Cathy Young· Guest1:16
But people are still being executed. A white male is, I think, like 20 times more likely to be shot dead by a cop than a Black female. There are people on the left who really, quite honestly believe that,