The War on Science in Canada | Geoff Horsman
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Host Sean Rasmussen sits down with Geoff Horsman, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University and contributor to the new book “The War on Science.” Together, they dive into the growing ideological influences affecting research and scientific inquiry in Canada. From the challenges posed by mandated equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) requirements to the politicization of research funding through government agencies, Geoff Horsman shares his journey from a science-focused introvert to a vocal advocate for truth and open inquiry. The conversation explores the clash between liberal science and critical social justice ideologies, the impact of identity politics on scientific progress, and the urgent need to recentre truth as a guiding principle. If you care about the future of science, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity, this is a must-listen episode.
Guest Links:
Book: The War on Science
Twitter/X: @HorsmanGeoff
Laurier Heterodox Substack: https://laurierhxa.substack.com/
Empowr: https://empowrconnect.substack.com/
In our conversation Geoff also mentioned the work of Jonathan Rauch on the nature of scientific inquiry and what Rauch calls, “liberal science”:
- Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, Expanded Edition
- The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
Summary of Episode
Science Under Siege: The War from Within
Geoff Horsman is one of the 39 essayists featured in the newly released book “The War on Science.” The book delves into the internal threats facing scientific inquiry today—ranging from cancel culture to compelled political speech, and ideological frameworks like diversity, equity, and inclusion (EDI). According to Geoff Horsman, these ideas are reshaping the operations and ethos of modern universities, subtly but surely changing what it means to pursue knowledge.
The Path to Science—and to Culture Wars
Geoff Horsman shares his background: a quiet curiosity for the natural world, a love of focused work, and an unexpected journey from introverted scientist to outspoken critic of ideological incursions. His research centers on enzymology, bio-catalysis, and the discovery of new biochemical pathways—traditionally insulated from the pressures of social politics.
Yet, as he details, even the “hard sciences” aren’t immune. The tipping point for him came in 2021 while applying for a research grant—the application process required a pass/fail EDI section that superseded scientific evaluation. This propelled him down the “rabbit hole” of EDI ideology, where empirical and logical scientific discourse seemed to clash with dogmatic, untestable social beliefs. Geoff Horsman calls for a recentering of truth as science’s principle, rather than “niceness,” cautioning against sacrificing honesty for social comfort.
Liberal Science vs. Critical Social Justice
Drawing from Jonathan Rauch’s work on knowledge production, Geoff Horsman explains the foundational principles of liberal science: knowledge is always provisional (no one gets the final say), and it is universal (no one gets personal authority by virtue of identity or status). He highlights growing campus trends that violate these tenets—like privileging “Indigenous ways of knowing,” which sometimes restrict certain types of knowledge by ethnicity, or reframing science as “Western science,” threatening universality and testability.
How Ideology Shapes Science Funding
The episode dives deep into the Canadian science funding system, principally governed by government agencies known collectively as the Tri-Council. These agencies now embed political and ideological requirements—like EDI rubrics—into grant applications, effectively crowding out non-conforming research and incentivizing self-censorship. Geoff Horsman gives examples of awards reserved for certain demographics, emphasizing that hiring or funding based primarily on identity characteristics undermines scientific merit and trust.
The Dangers of Self-Censorship—and Lying For Convenience
Throughout the discussion, Geoff Horsman underscores a disturbing trend: many scientists choose to “go along to get along,” either out of fear for their careers, social pressures, or sheer convenience. He argues that such compromises erode character and trust within the scientific community, and can ultimately lead to broader cultural problems, like groupthink and the exclusion of dissenting viewpoints.
Can We Fix It? Building Communities for Free Inquiry
The episode wraps up on a cautiously optimistic note. Geoff Horsman shares his involvement with the Heterodox Academy and Empower, grassroots organizations aimed at fostering viewpoint diversity and reforming both universities and public schools. He emphasizes the importance of small, resilient communities that promote open discussion and challenge authoritarian tendencies—whether they manifest as hard censorship or subtle cultural pressures toward conformity.
Transcript
Note: transcript is machine-generated and may contain typos, especially with names.
Geoff Horsman [00:00:00]:
Now, I don’t have much tolerance for the idea of being nice. Truth is far more important than being nice. I mean, that’s not to say we should seek conflict or be rude, but niceness is no excuse for lying. And that is the trade off, that is the arena of trade offs we’re discussing now. Just be polite, let it go and say what you’re told to say. Believe what we tell you to believe. I think that is why we have to recenter truth as our guiding principle.
Sean Rasmussen [00:00:37]:
Welcome to Viewpoints. I’m Shawn Rasmussen. My guest today is Jeff Horstman, Associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Wilfrid Laurier University. In addition to his roles as professor and researcher, Jeff is actively involved in promoting and defending free speech and open inquiry on campus and in working to shed light on the insidious effects of that compelled political speech has on science. Jeff Horstman, welcome to Viewpoints.
Geoff Horsman [00:01:10]:
Well, thank you very much for having me, Sean. I appreciate it.
Sean Rasmussen [00:01:13]:
You’re one of 39 contributors to the new book the War on Science, along with some pretty prominent public intellectuals, including Richard Dawkins. What is this book about and what is this war that is being waged?
Geoff Horsman [00:01:27]:
Yeah, well, the book is really a collection of essays that’s divided into a variety of topics. They’re generally, I guess, what you would categorize, I suppose as the internal war on science from within. This would be things like the cancel culture, things like diversity, equity and inclusion, indigenization, decolonization. Broadly, the ideological incursions that are reshaping how we pursue knowledge in the academy, how we do teaching, the general operations of the modern university, are really being reframed and reshaped through these ideological incursions. And I think the book gives example after example from a variety of different perspectives, from people across different political spectrum, different disciplines, but all of them from within the academy.
Sean Rasmussen [00:02:24]:
And you’ve devoted your life to scientific inquiry. What got you interested in science?
Geoff Horsman [00:02:30]:
This is always such a hard question to answer when people ask me this, because so many people have these interesting stories about some defining moment or pursuit from a young age. And I don’t know how to answer that question. I sometimes resort to the fact that I grew up on a farm and perhaps had an interest in natural phenomenon. But I think I just sort of gravitated towards the. I think part of it is I’m naturally introverted. And the idea of being able to study something and focus on something, sort of being somewhat isolated from the world, there’s a certain appeal to that. Being able to do your Work without being bothered. Maybe I just kind of came up with that. Now I don’t know if there is, but I think there is.
Sean Rasmussen [00:03:21]:
That makes sense. It kind of suits in it a person who wants to be focused on something in particular.
Geoff Horsman [00:03:26]:
Yeah, you know, I like kind of being quietly thinking about things. So that makes it all the more strange that I’m now out there fighting the culture war. It’s very odd I would never find myself here.
Sean Rasmussen [00:03:42]:
It’s almost. Yeah, I could see that. And what’s your particular area of research and expertise?
Geoff Horsman [00:03:48]:
I was trained as an enzymologist. So this is the study of how proteins, a class of them called enzymes, catalyze reactions. So all reactions in our body, metabolic reactions, are catalyzed by these proteins. So just very simple reactions. Often in one of my introductory classes, I talk about. I think it’s a phosphorylase reaction or something. And without an enzyme, it takes, you know, the rate enhancement is so much that without it, we’re talking millions or even close to a billion years for a few turnovers. So it clearly demonstrates that biological catalysis is a. As a precondition for life. And so all these reactions are facilitated by enzymes. And you can use that knowledge to even create new pathways, new compounds. And so a lot of the work we do now is focused on finding enzymes and pathways that make new molecules. And part of that involves looking through genomic databases to find interesting combinations of genes that suggest a new reaction is happening.
Sean Rasmussen [00:05:04]:
Oh, interesting. Is that what your lab is focusing on researching?
Geoff Horsman [00:05:09]:
Yes.
Sean Rasmussen [00:05:10]:
Okay. How do you do research on that kind of thing?
Geoff Horsman [00:05:12]:
Well, it’s a few different ways, so. So some of our work is. Is just computational. So, you know, I have one paper where it actually was. It stemmed from the lockdown, actually. We couldn’t go into the lab for months at a time. So it really was okay, I’m just going to sit in front of the computer. And it was something I recognized I needed to do for a long time, but this was. It sort of forced me to make the time to. And so that’s really just looking through, mining through these large data sets and trying to make associations of where you might find interesting new chemistry. And so we found some interesting new things. So now in the lab, you have a hypothesis from this genomic data, you see combinations of genes that are interesting. You pull out those genes, you express the proteins, and then you provide them with the metabolites, try to make new compounds and just build up these pathways by bit by bit and see if your Hypotheses are true or if you can engineer enzymes to do the reactions you want. So that’s really. And so that involves the laboratory work would be pretty classical methods in enzymology of protein expression, purification, a lot of small molecule reactions. We have things like mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography, nmr. Yeah.
Sean Rasmussen [00:06:35]:
And I can imagine this kind of research will have a big impact on something like medicine and potentially things.
Geoff Horsman [00:06:42]:
Potentially it’s like all of these things. You know, we always say in our grant applications how this is could have big impact in this area. In this area. I think they almost never do, to be honest, in terms of academic research, it’s very.
Sean Rasmussen [00:06:56]:
Don’t tell anyone.
Geoff Horsman [00:06:57]:
Yeah, well, I think they’ll find out eventually.
Sean Rasmussen [00:07:01]:
When I hear you talk about this as really hard science, this is just, you know, full on science. And so it’s hard to imagine politics getting into this type of thing. But when we did our prep call, you explained to me the process by which you were in a way taken off guard or caught by surprise by the wave of politics that came through the institution and how it affected you even personally. Can you talk a bit about what got you interested in doing some work around open inquiry and freedom of speech and things like that?
Geoff Horsman [00:07:34]:
Yeah, well, you know, I describe myself as wanting to be left alone to do science like most scientists. As they say, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And so around 2021, I applied for a grant and this grant required an EDI section.
Sean Rasmussen [00:07:58]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:07:59]:
Quite a significant one, I guess we.
Sean Rasmussen [00:08:01]:
Should say for listeners. EDI is equity, Diversity, inclusion.
Geoff Horsman [00:08:04]:
Right. And in Canadian institutions, academia, government, that’s EDI is the official acronym, whereas in the US the official acronym is dei.
Sean Rasmussen [00:08:18]:
Yeah.
Geoff Horsman [00:08:18]:
Canada and Britain it’s edi. But in the public imagination, even in Canada, DEI is understood as the, the acronym. So it becomes confusing, but they’re the same thing. So the EDI section of this grant required that I identify systemic barriers and come up with ways to address them. So there’s a rubric that defined how you should address this in your grant. But what was particularly, I think egregious about this is that this part of your grant was evaluated on a pass fail basis. So if you fail the EDI section, it will not proceed to be evaluated on the science.
Sean Rasmussen [00:09:05]:
So you got to get the edi. Right. Or else you’re not going to get any money for your research.
Geoff Horsman [00:09:10]:
Right. And this was a, an idea I was pretty excited about, I was pretty proud of it. So when I saw this, it. It made me sit up and take notice. Okay, this is clearly something that people think is important. And naively I thought, well, this must be some new science out of, you know, in business schools, HR people, what do you call them? Human resource management or whatever the term is in that part of business schools. They’ve clearly done some research showing that if you do this, it’ll boost your productivity or who knows? But I just assumed that they knew what they were talking about. I didn’t know it was an ideological project. So I, I did. What I think you should do when you want to learn a new area is that I try to read and.
Sean Rasmussen [00:09:55]:
About edi.
Geoff Horsman [00:09:56]:
Yeah. And my approach here is to try to. I think I, you know, I had learned enough from just general reading that it was controversial that there were some people who were opposed to some of these things. So the way I would approach trying to inform myself would be to find, I thought, were the best thinkers on either side of the topic and try to read a few books on either side. Now, if you think of the thinkers opposed to it, they would be people like Tom Soul, you know, if you’re reading about discrimination and disparities, for example, that’s a very good book. On the other side, the books that people were suggesting I should read were things like Abram X Kendi, how to Be an Anti Racist.
Sean Rasmussen [00:10:42]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:10:44]:
You read these two books side by side and try to make any sort of comparison in. They’re not even the same world. One is empirical, it makes logical arguments. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s very well written. The other. Well, Kenny writes well, I suppose, but it is actually very disturbing. He is making a case for racism. Yeah, it’s actually quite sickening. So it didn’t take me long to realize that we’re not dealing with an academic project. We’re not dealing with anything that’s based in science. We’re dealing with an ideology that at its heart is steeped in critical race theory. And I think it’s racist.
Sean Rasmussen [00:11:30]:
Yeah, I think a lot of people would agree with you on that. There’s also a lot of people out there, too, Canadians in particular, who just see this as being nice or being kind or, you know, all the, all the good things that Canadians are supposed to be. And I think it sounds like when you’re talking about how you were caught off guard late to the party, in a way, you might have been one of those Canadians too, right before. Before you started going down the rabbit hole on this stuff.
Geoff Horsman [00:11:56]:
Yeah, yeah, no, I think that would be fair to say, you know, you’re kind of sleepwalking in a way. Things are nice, things are fine. I don’t think about it too hard. I’ve got stuff to do. But now I don’t have much tolerance for the idea of being nice. I don’t think that’s important. Truth is far more important than being nice. I mean that’s not to say we should seek conflict or be rude, but, but niceness is no excuse for lying. And that is the trade off, that is the arena of trade offs we’re discussing now. Just be polite, let it go and say what you’re told to said believe what we tell you to believe that I think that is why we have to recenter truth as our guiding principle.
Sean Rasmussen [00:12:48]:
Is there a fundamental conflict between what Jonathan Rauch calls the liberal science model and some of the ideas in critical social justice studies? Is there something that’s fundamentally incompatible between those two things?
Geoff Horsman [00:13:05]:
I guess it depends what we mean by these terms, right? I think so, based on how I would define critical social justice because it, I think it starts from conclusions. So I guess we should, we could start with the Roush definitions of liberal science, which I think are so elegant and simple that we should really, I really want to popularize them and, and spread them because they make so much sense and when I teach them, students really get it. It’s, it’s not that difficult. So for the audience, the, the Jonathan Rauch is that writer and philosopher, I Suppose, who in 1993 he had a book called Kindly Inquisitors about the new attacks on free speech. And even back then, I guess this would be the early days of political correctness.
Sean Rasmussen [00:13:58]:
Yeah.
Geoff Horsman [00:13:59]:
And he identified, I think it was the Salman Rushdie affair where all of a sudden people started equivocating, you know, that maybe censoring this book is okay because we don’t upset people. And so it was a real. He identifies at an early moment in, in censorship, but in that book and he developed it a little more or expanded upon it in different ways in his Constitution of Knowledge in about three or four years ago. Liberal science is this term that he uses to describe liberal societies. He kind of describes it as I guess the third leg of a three legged stool along with free market economics, the liberal economic system and our liberal democratic political system. So he considered liberal science as our knowledge production system, our epistemic system, how we develop knowledge. And it has these two rules. So one is that knowledge is provisional. He says no one gets the final say. And I really like that because it makes sense. When do you, can you ever say that, you know, you’ve got the final speed of light or the gravitational constant, you’ve got it correct, you’ve got the size of the universe to the exact. You, you. It’s always open to being tested, refined, revised. And, and that rule is always, is, is increasingly being broken on campus because when you hear people saying that such and such a topic is beyond debate or the science is settled, okay, they’re def, they’re defying a rule of science, Right. They have, I think, disqualified themselves as a credible scientist by making those assertions. It’s an authoritative stance. So the second rule is that no one has personal authority. So you cannot use your personal status or identity status to say that you have a certain view of knowledge that’s inaccessible to others, that because of who you are, you know, knowledge that other people cannot access. And again, we’re seeing this being broken on campus too, right? Because people are saying that there are certain ethnic ways of knowing, or you have to account for people’s lived experience, so you can’t really understand them and you have to let them do work in their way. And again, this also defies science. Science has to be. These are Mertonian norms of universality. Science is universal. So. And it’s transcendent. Long after we are all dead, it should stand. Our discovery should stand up.
Sean Rasmussen [00:16:32]:
A new society could come along after a thousand years and reproduce the same study. And it would work or not work, depending on.
Geoff Horsman [00:16:41]:
Yes. And that’s why I think mathematics is probably the purest form of this idea. Right. The constant PI is going to exist. Whether humanity vanishes from the planet tomorrow, that’s still going to exist as a mathematical constant. It’s transcendent. And I think that is really how we should view science and the knowledge that we produce. And so when people make claims that are unique to themselves, that violates the spirit of science.
Sean Rasmussen [00:17:09]:
Can you give us some examples of things in universities where those principles of science are being violated in the scientific arena?
Geoff Horsman [00:17:17]:
I think the, the biggest incursion we see now is the indigenous ways of knowing. Indigenous knowledge is being incorporated into our university. We have a strategic plan to incorporate it across all areas of disciplines, all courses.
Sean Rasmussen [00:17:32]:
Oh, wow.
Geoff Horsman [00:17:33]:
Now that hasn’t. I haven’t really seen it. It’s in a plan, it’s in a document. I haven’t seen anything practical on the ground advancing it significantly.
Sean Rasmussen [00:17:43]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:17:44]:
Right now it’s mostly. I walked in my department. I see all Sorts of indigenous things, sort of almost religious statements about grandfather teachings and these sorts of things. But we’re starting to see little linguistic things like students talking about Western science versus other science. Okay, so when you start to preface science with Western, that violates the transcendent truth seeking, search for knowledge. It’s saying that there’s a difference between a Western approach to truth seeking and an indigenous or some other type of method. Now that may be, but I think if we’re going to stick to science, then we don’t need to preface it with Western. We have to say what science is. And I think that that’s why the Roche definition is, is so elegant and simple, that it works really well and I think it holds up. But, but we, I think we have to. I think the problem is that most scientists don’t really know how to define science because we haven’t thought about it. We’ve just absorbed it from the culture and we sort of understand it and sort of in our bones, but we can’t really define it. And so when things like this come along and say, well, it’s Western, that’s a Western way, you could think about other ways of doing things too. They don’t really have a lot of defenses and they just kind of sit back because they’re scared of being called racist. And so now you have these new ideas coming in and you’re starting to see grants now where increasingly they just bring on an advisor, an indigenous advisor, for example. And so we’re spending money on just bringing someone in based on their ethnicity. And that’s supposed to be respectful or something. So yeah, again, that violates Rauch’s rule. It’s just this knowledge should be available for anyone. Oh, here’s another example, another specific example. I was presented at Senate last week, our Senate academic planning committee. And there was, before I presented, there was someone talking about a, I believe it was medicinal plants, indigenous medicinal plants course in science that had been, it had been given or taught by, I think an indigenous elder. And apparently they were going to stop giving this course because they decided that this knowledge was not to be shared outside of their indigenous community.
Sean Rasmussen [00:20:19]:
It’s like a walled garden of knowledge or something.
Geoff Horsman [00:20:22]:
Right? So it’s not universal, it’s not transcendent, it’s not available to all intestinal by all. It’s restricted by ethnicity. So it’s not science, this is something else.
Sean Rasmussen [00:20:34]:
Okay, Cultural preservation or something.
Geoff Horsman [00:20:37]:
Everyone just thought this is reasonable or I don’t know what they thought because they’d be too scared to say. Probably what I’m saying is that I think that we have to define science and recognize what isn’t or what aspects of something that’s masquerading as science, what aspects violate it. And you know, so I think these discussions just aren’t being had.
Sean Rasmussen [00:20:57]:
And that kind of identity focus where a person’s identity is more important than the ideas that they’re sharing or.
Geoff Horsman [00:21:03]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s really a form of. Yeah. Almost ad hominem. We really are, are centering that the person over the ideas. And like I said, ideas should be transcendent. The pie of constant. It doesn’t matter who, who discovered it or articulated it. It’s is there.
Sean Rasmussen [00:21:25]:
But, but like I guess a lot of the postmodern theorists are they, they want to blow away objective truth and knowledge and things like that as being socially constructed. And when you were reading about this stuff, you probably came across those arguments.
Geoff Horsman [00:21:39]:
Yeah, I think, well they’re, they’re like I say, I think the ideas are coming into science because they’re, they’re sort of attacking Western science as one way of doing things. But you’re going to start to see more narrative descriptions of the world might be legitimate, but they don’t really explain what these are. I mean we just updated our faculty of science tenure and promotion guidelines to include indigenous knowledge, but there’s not really a definition of what that is.
Sean Rasmussen [00:22:15]:
You’ve written a lot about particularly the research side of things and how the scientific research is being addled a little bit by these incursions of like politicization. So research funding is starting to become politicized. And so if you don’t have the right group think ideas about something or other, then you won’t get a, you won’t get a grant. And that this leads to all kinds of different self censorship and variety of different negative social factors that go into the academic pursuit. In Canada, funding for scientific research is highly centralized it sounds like. And so you’ve identified that in the Canadian context there’s this thing called the TRI Council.
Geoff Horsman [00:23:00]:
Yep.
Sean Rasmussen [00:23:01]:
And so people who are people like yourself who are going through and trying to get funding for their labs are going to have to go through this kind of process. Can you describe a bit about what that TRI Council is and how it uses its financial clout to disseminate ideology throughout these research institutions?
Geoff Horsman [00:23:22]:
Yeah, so the, you know about, I guess World War II, you know, mid 20th century, there was really a shift in how science was done. It used to be Far more decentralized. You know, even you go back to, you know, University of Toronto, the banting and best discovery there was. You know, these guys were kind of just working away at the University of Toronto and, you know, on this idea they had, it started to get a bit of traction. I think a dean or a department chair kind of gave them a bit of lab space, maybe a bit of funding to keep going. And then, you know, they would get some from a private foundation. And I think Eli Lilly got involved. So it was really just an ad hoc when you got a good idea and people started funding it.
Sean Rasmussen [00:24:08]:
So it’s a bit more entrepreneurial in a sense.
Geoff Horsman [00:24:10]:
Yes. Yeah, it was, it was. It was just. That’s how science traditionally was done. It was more market driven. And then it really, I think, emanated from. From the US where we had this Vannevar Bush and the Endless Frontier after World War II. You know, there’s a lot of the Sputnik moment. We gotta fund science and really build it up through the government. And so there’s a lot of lobbying to start developing science agencies to fund academic research.
Sean Rasmussen [00:24:43]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:24:43]:
And so that was mirrored in Canada as well with things that over time have evolved to become what we call the TRI Council, because there’s three of them that work together just based broadly on the discipline you work in. You would apply to the different council. So the one that I generally apply to is the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, nserc. So that’s physical, life sciences, mathematics, engineering, these sorts of things. The other big one is cihr, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research. So that would be for medical research, but that also grabs a lot of life sciences research. So some. Some of the work I do, you could probably starts to be some overlap.
Sean Rasmussen [00:25:33]:
Maybe apply to both places.
Geoff Horsman [00:25:35]:
Yeah. And there’s a lot of basic research, not just clinical, done by C. Okay. And then there’s the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Shirc, it’s called NSERC. CIHR and Shirc together are the tri council. And they fund several. What is it, about $4 billion a year or something like that. So it’s a pretty considerable amount. And that effectively has, I. I would say, crowded out most other forms of funding.
Sean Rasmussen [00:26:09]:
Okay, so there’s no other game in town if you want funding?
Geoff Horsman [00:26:12]:
No, there’s others, but. But these dominate. I don’t know what the percentage would be. I mean, I would guess maybe 80% of funding at universities is funded by these three, maybe even more. Mm. There are some other pots of money. Some, you know, some industrial research comes in. We have, you know, and I have a colleague who does a lot of water research. And so there’s a lot of interest, you know, from wastewater management facilities. Always want to test new things and learn new things. So there’s always a bit of industrial money that comes in. And it’s quite often governments will, will fund collaboration between industry and academia. And so it’s actually a good deal for industry to get some work done that way.
Sean Rasmussen [00:26:57]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:26:58]:
But yeah, you know, that’s actually interesting. It’s. I’m now wondering how much where industry without government help would come in and give a project to into an academic lab. I think that would be very rare.
Sean Rasmussen [00:27:12]:
Yeah. Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:27:13]:
And there’s some foundations as well. We have, you know, the Ms. Foundation or Alzheimer’s or these types of our cancer societies and things that would fund some projects as well. But overwhelmingly the tri counts are the big players.
Sean Rasmussen [00:27:26]:
Okay. And these are basically like, are they quasi government or are they just government or how’s that?
Geoff Horsman [00:27:32]:
They’re federal government agencies.
Sean Rasmussen [00:27:33]:
Okay. Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:27:35]:
Yeah. So yeah, they get a budget from. Yeah.
Sean Rasmussen [00:27:38]:
Federal government having most of the funding for research and science in Canada being controlled by government does open it up for. To the risk of politicization.
Geoff Horsman [00:27:49]:
Definitely. Definitely. Right.
Sean Rasmussen [00:27:53]:
Yeah. And you’ve outlined a few of the ways that this happens in Canada. You mentioned a few of them, like agency research priorities, discriminatory disbursements, you call them, and required ideological commitments, which I think are basically like you call pseudoscience, I believe, and assessment of social benefit. And so maybe we can just talk a little about those. Those things and how they steer or shape the ideological climate that science is working under right now.
Geoff Horsman [00:28:25]:
Sure. So the first one you mentioned, I guess was the. What was it?
Sean Rasmussen [00:28:30]:
The agency priorities. Agency research priorities.
Geoff Horsman [00:28:33]:
Yeah. So. So this takes the form of directing money into particular priorities. So what you’ll often get, I get every week my university research office will send out an email with funding calls from the agencies. They have programs. So different grants and awards programs. And increasingly what you see in these calls for. For funding. They want you to apply to get a grant to study something like sustainability and climate change.
Sean Rasmussen [00:29:04]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:29:05]:
Or equitable practices.
Sean Rasmussen [00:29:11]:
Even in the hard sciences.
Geoff Horsman [00:29:13]:
Yeah. So plastics and waste. So okay, so then you can get money if you do this. Okay. So you know, how do we do a sustainable system? I mean even, you know, in what I do, you can frame your work towards the government priority, even if you don’t know if it’s super realistic. But here’s why it’s important. Right. Okay. I could say what I do. I could, I can easily make a case for it and I have. And, and I do because it is, it’s a plausible case. I don’t think it’s, you know, but whether it’s market tested to actually work is much more of a sketchy proposition. But that’s not the test. It’s like tell us how you’re going to address this global problem or whatever it is that we want.
Sean Rasmussen [00:30:00]:
And so they’ve, they’ve set the priority like so it would be something like climate change. So they’re assuming that that is a problem and then they’re directing research towards that thing that they already have decided is the right. Environmental researchers are kind of scrambling around to shape their research to those priorities.
Geoff Horsman [00:30:18]:
Right. And then what you notice is that the institutions align themselves with the priorities signaled from the federal government. So for example, my university has a research office which crafts a five year research strategic plan and they outline four or five key themes and inevitably it’s something about environment and sustainability. There’s one that’s equity, diversity, inclusion. I think there’s an indigeneity one. Yeah, so. So they’re all sort of aligned broadly with the political priorities of the federal government or probably more accurately the liberal party. Yeah, that’s generally how it’s reshaped. Now there’s a fair bit of wiggle room. Right. When you say environmental and sustainability, well, you can almost put anything into there. And I think they would argue, well, you know, these are just broad themes, so what’s the harm? And you know, I suppose you could be generous and say that’s true, but it also gets everyone thinking along the same page. Okay. So you’re going to have a subtle pressure or a sub you’re incentivized to as your research progresses to, to look for ways that will align with government priorities. Because you know that that’s when funding calls come. You know, if you’re in a progressive sphere, you’ve got more opportunities to apply to lot, lot more different parts of money. So if you’re working on something that’s, you know, with stress organisms, stress tolerance to heat, okay, you’re going to slot it into a lot of, a lot of changes that are environment and climate change related.
Sean Rasmussen [00:32:02]:
But how does equity, diversity, inclusion fit into a scientific hard science research grant?
Geoff Horsman [00:32:08]:
Well, it doesn’t in my opinion. I think that’s oldly political research theme that the university has chosen. In fact, we have a research awards at the university. There’s two Awards every year they give out that are quite prestigious. They kind of are given to what the university considers their top researchers. One’s the university Researcher award, the other is an early researcher or early career researcher award. And this year when this, when the call came a few months ago from the, from the research office, it said, you know, a short description of, of what you need to do to get this award and your, your application or nomination should outline how you have embedded equity, diversity and inclusion into your research.
Sean Rasmussen [00:32:52]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:32:53]:
Again, I mean in my work there’s, you know, how do you seek equity, diversity and inclusion in molecules or enzymes? Right. So what I’ll probably want you to talk about is how you look for when you hire graduate students or postdocs. You’re looking at, you know, making sure that you advertise to different groups and that then maybe you embed this into your research by I don’t even know how. I mean.
Sean Rasmussen [00:33:24]:
Yeah, yeah, you’re working at it.
Geoff Horsman [00:33:26]:
And this is the problem is that, you know, many professors we’ve talked to, several who’ve said I, I wanted to apply for this and they’re actually really unhappy because I don’t, they didn’t apply because they felt they could not. There was no way to describe their particular research that was either really technical in some area as having anything to do with edi. And that was a bridge too far. But this is, I think this is the, this is the, I guess reducto ad absurdum of when you infect ideology into science it’s not going to like find a reasonable spot and just kind of stick there. Yeah, activists are always going to push it because this is just a good way for people to get sinecures and get more of the, and mind the reputation and status of hard science for their own benefit, you know, short term obviously. But yeah, you can get a good salary by, by doing this sort of stuff.
Sean Rasmussen [00:34:28]:
Another thing you talk about is something called discriminatory disbursements. Can you, can you outline what that is?
Geoff Horsman [00:34:33]:
Sure. This is the dispersing awards or positions based on race, sex, gender, these sorts of things. So based on diversity, so identity characteristics. So I think the examples I mentioned in that piece include for example there’s a long standing program at the TRI councils like NSERC has a USRA award, so does CIHR and sshrc. So this is for summer students Undergraduate Student Research award. So usually the idea is that a professor might hire a student for the summer if they get one of these awards. That offsets a lot of the costs from the professor’s grants to fund them and makes them more attractive or maybe enables them to get a position they wouldn’t otherwise get or, you know, so, so it does fund significant number of summer research students across Canada.
Sean Rasmussen [00:35:29]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:35:30]:
But now I believe both CIHR and SRC have said that those awards are currently reserved exclusively for black students. Right. So that would be a discriminatory disbursement. You are using EDI criteria to discriminate, to instantiate racial discrimination across the system.
Sean Rasmussen [00:35:51]:
Okay, so some. Yeah, so basically, if you’re a white male, you may need not apply or.
Geoff Horsman [00:35:57]:
Or indigenous or Asian or anything except that particular profile.
Sean Rasmussen [00:36:03]:
And I guess this is ostensibly done for good reasons, but it can have a negative impact on, on how science is done. Can you talk a bit about what that, how that might affect it negatively?
Geoff Horsman [00:36:16]:
Well, yes, in many ways, if you hire someone for their skin color. Well, there’s at least two obvious problems here. One, you’re not hiring them for their skill or what they’ll contribute. So. So you’re hurting the scientific enterprise and the discovery enterprise. Because if they’re good, they would have been hired anyway. Of course, you know, the EDI advocates would argue against it. They would say that we’re racist and wouldn’t hire someone unless there’s a program. But of course, it also hurts that person because they are now forever tarred with the, maybe even not so subtle idea that they were hired because of this characteristic. And when you have a formally prestigious program being restricted by race, and often it’s really hard to find enough of a particular demographic that they desperately want in these positions that you’re sometimes hiring people who may not be at top of the class or their grades might not be in the range you would normally consider for one of these types of awards just to fulfill the requirements of this ideological program.
Sean Rasmussen [00:37:28]:
And so the required ideological commitments are the adherence to certain assumptions about why it is, for example, that certain groups of people are doing less well than others or. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Geoff Horsman [00:37:44]:
So with that, I think I, I take a harder line on this than a lot of my colleagues. They think, well, you can kind of take, you know, a loosey goosey approach. And you don’t have to say you agree with racial discrimination or those sorts of, you know, hardcore hardline EDI things. You can kind of just say, what’s your general training philosophy about making sure people are treated equally? You train them right depending on their personality. I reject that because that’s laundering the reputation of edi. Because edi, in addition to these What I think are very, I’m going to say, evil policies of racial discrimination and censorship and the like, but underlying it is an entirely deranged philosophy. And I think I outlined in that piece, I quoted from the EDI Best Practices manual, which as a scientist, you’re supposed to read to understand edi. And if a scientist does read that, they should slap themselves silly if they then go ahead and agree to anything EDI related, because it says. I can’t remember the exact wording, but effectively it says you have to believe. You have to believe that there are invisible forces structuring society by skin color, for example, with white people at the top and then progressive shades of skin lower down. It’s something entirely deranged and racist. So you have to believe that. And, and they call this the code. The code word they use for this is systemic barriers. And they say systemic barriers may be invisible to those who do not experience them. And then they say all individuals must acknowledge the existence of systemic barriers. Okay, they just said, you cannot. This may be invisible to you. You may not be able to detect it, measure it, observe it in any way. So it’s not scientific. This is like a religious belief now. And you must acknowledge it, it exists. So I just can’t believe that people aren’t in, like, completely revolting and letting these idiots have it. It’s just unbelievably stupid.
Sean Rasmussen [00:40:04]:
There’s been a whole cottage industry over the last five years or more of people just trying to explain how this happened, how we got to this place in these institutions.
Geoff Horsman [00:40:16]:
Oh, that’s easy enough.
Sean Rasmussen [00:40:18]:
Please, please.
Geoff Horsman [00:40:21]:
Well, no, I shouldn’t. We shouldn’t be that confident.
Sean Rasmussen [00:40:24]:
It’s all about.
Geoff Horsman [00:40:24]:
It’s all about speech restrictions. It starts and ends.
Sean Rasmussen [00:40:28]:
Okay, what do you mean by that?
Geoff Horsman [00:40:30]:
Well, and, and not necessarily formal, informal. So we’ve, We’ve. There’s a culture of a spiral of silence where you just feel the weight of saying anything that may offend this new ideology. And especially now, it’s. I feel more relaxed. But you surely remember what it was like three, four, five years ago. Yeah, you know, the summer of Floyd and then the, the, the mass graves hoax. Like all of these things, it was just a, like a weight of a pressure. Like it was. Just don’t step out of line because who knows what happens? And all bets are off. We are not in a rule of law right now. So under those conditions, there was no way to seek truth, make informed policy. And of course, that was when we brought in all sorts of new policies, all sorts of new things snuck in during that time when it was you were at serious risks for your job or even your freedom, if you even asked questions. So I think that’s how this happened in large part now. I mean, it’s probably more complicated. And it wasn’t just in the last five years. It’s been a slow. Something that’s slowly been building over time. But if we cannot say what we think and cannot speak what we believe to be true, then all manner of terrible, terrible things can happen.
Sean Rasmussen [00:41:55]:
Huh. And so we’ve talked a bit about, like, the content of that stuff, which is that there’s like a systemic problems going on there. Racism and sexism and things like that. And a lot of people are saying that science is sexist, racist, all these various things. What you’re saying is, well, it may or may not be. Let’s look at it, let’s find out if it is. Let’s try to show, using data and using analysis, whether or not these things are occurring. And if they are, then let’s fix them. That would be what I think might be your position, but I don’t want.
Geoff Horsman [00:42:29]:
To speak for you. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think, yes, I would start from presumption of innocence, not starting from presumption of guilt, and then imposing all sorts of the things that they wanted to eradicate. They’re imposing these things in the name of eradicating them. Right. So, no, I, I agree. You’d have to. If you want to make. If you want to make an accusation of guilt, then I think the onus is on you to prove it, and there’s no attempt.
Sean Rasmussen [00:42:59]:
And that’s sort of what really rankles a person who’s like a hard scientist, because you’re kind of geared at looking for things in that way, looking for proof and evidence.
Geoff Horsman [00:43:08]:
Well, I’m not sure because there’s a lot of hard scientists who don’t seem to care. So I don’t know if it’s got anything to do with me being a hard scientist.
Sean Rasmussen [00:43:18]:
Okay. Okay. How can someone jive that with being a scientist and then letting this stuff roll through? Is it just because it’s. They just don’t want to bother or.
Geoff Horsman [00:43:29]:
It’s a good question. I have some ideas of why that might be. I think most people. Well, I know some who, who don’t like it, but they don’t want to stick their neck out. And they say things like, the pendulum will swing back, you know, why should I sacrifice. Why should I lose grants and, you know, sacrifice my career? You Know, it’s just a little, you know, just make the statement and it’s not that big a deal.
Sean Rasmussen [00:43:57]:
Yeah.
Geoff Horsman [00:43:58]:
So people are pretty good at justifying.
Sean Rasmussen [00:44:01]:
Things like that, like the silence around it and going along with it.
Geoff Horsman [00:44:06]:
Yeah. Going along with something that you don’t believe. To me that’s lying, that’s dishonest. And if you don’t draw the line at zero tolerance in your own personal life, then I think that you very, I don’t know, I have a friend who says evil is never satisfied or sin is never satisfied or something. So how do you distinguish a good lie from a lie that’s gone too far? I would suggest that that’s an impo. Like I, I think we have a whole tradition of religious tradition of just saying don’t lie. I think it might be a commandment or something somewhere. So, you know, if you just start there and just don’t lie, then it’s going to make things a lot easier for you. I mean, or harder.
Sean Rasmussen [00:44:53]:
Maybe initially, yes.
Geoff Horsman [00:44:55]:
I mean, maybe in some ways in material ways, perhaps in career progression ways. I think in my estimation those are relatively minor in the, in long run.
Sean Rasmussen [00:45:09]:
So in Canada, how serious is this issue in research and science in academia right now? What’s your gut feeling on that? Is it a big problem or is it just something we have to clean up or where are you at with that?
Geoff Horsman [00:45:24]:
I think it’s a big problem. I guess it depends on what you mean by what issue.
Sean Rasmussen [00:45:30]:
Okay. I guess ideological corruption of research and science and things like that.
Geoff Horsman [00:45:38]:
I think a big issue. It’s so hard to measure it though. It’s so hard to know what it means. Right. When you, because you know, my colleagues in the hard sciences, I think are, I trust their data, like I don’t think they’re making up data or fabricating things. But I’m more concerned about the erosion of character and trust. So your integrity is very valuable. And if scientists are trading that away for a short term gain, it’s not even a personal financial gain. It’s just, this is what’s also strange about it. In the US if you lose a grant, you know, that’s your summer salary. But in Canada, our grants are not tied to our salary. So it’s not even you pay a personal financial cost. It’s, it’s about, okay, you lab, you, you can’t hire or expand or publish more. So it’s, you know, to trade away your integrity for that is extra confusing to me. But like I say, the costs are probably more in just the diminishment of the integrity and incentivizing low character people to get into science from the beginning. Right. So you’re the people who really don’t like this or disagree with some of these ideological views are, are going to be excluded. They’re not going to come into science. Right. Or, or they’re going to be people who disagree but then are willing to lie. And I think the first is better than the second. I think if you agree with any political position, you’re a socialist or a comment or anything, fine, you can probably still do good science. But now that means that those are the only people you’re going to have. And that’s going to have all sorts of other effects when you have groupthink take hold and all sorts of crazy things that we can’t really predict maybe can happen when the universe become super ideological echo chambers. I would say the larger issue, which, it’s funny no one wants to hear this, but I think I’m more and more convinced of it all the time. The larger issue, I think is that governments shouldn’t fund science at all.
Sean Rasmussen [00:47:52]:
Yeah, I was going to actually bring that up at some point, but I’m glad you did.
Geoff Horsman [00:47:55]:
Yeah, yeah. If we went back to the way it was in 1945 or you know, that time, then, you know, you’re going to have to have some reason for funding the work you do now. There’s no market test of value of your ideas. It’s all just other people, other academics doing peer review. But of course they all depend on the same system to fund their, you know, what in some cases is just nonsense. You know, I mean, the entire industry, you know, departments and grants funding gender identity studies just wouldn’t exist without government funding. I mean, maybe there’d be a small, you know, some, a few billionaires funding.
Sean Rasmussen [00:48:43]:
It or something, plastic surgeons or something like that.
Geoff Horsman [00:48:47]:
Right. Yeah, there’d be a few, you know, but it wouldn’t be public money that then is used to launder these ideas that are then taken seriously by governments and public schools and the like. I would say there’s no evidence that governments should fund science.
Sean Rasmussen [00:49:05]:
I was going to bring up, you know, a couple of case examples where like, you know, Isaac Newton and also Albert Einstein. Albert Einstein was working in a patent office when he was working on the theory of relativity. He was kind of just largely self funded for that particular part of his career. So it’s possible to do these things without government intervention.
Geoff Horsman [00:49:26]:
Yep.
Sean Rasmussen [00:49:27]:
But when you get into a lot of sciences, you start to have Some bigger costs. Like, it’s not just like a physicist who can do it all in his mind. He actually, in a lot of these other areas, you have to have a lab and you have to have expensive studies and all kinds of different things that cost a lot of money. So then you have to go to people and say, well, why are you going to fund this? Why?
Geoff Horsman [00:49:48]:
Right.
Sean Rasmussen [00:49:48]:
And then this. The scientist has to be a salesman too, or be.
Geoff Horsman [00:49:52]:
Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, I mean, we’re kind of like that now. I mean, it’s just, it’s a little easier. You don’t have to, you have to still write grants and pitch. But it’s just that there’s no standard of, of market value.
Sean Rasmussen [00:50:06]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:50:06]:
It’s a lot of standard. You just. Do you write well and do you, do you, can you write to please your peers?
Sean Rasmussen [00:50:13]:
Okay. Say all the right EDI words?
Geoff Horsman [00:50:16]:
Yeah. And it’s not even without that. It’s just, you know, you tend to see a lot of people doing very similar work, even spending decades doing very similar work. I mean, solid work, but not particularly. There’s no significant economic benefit or, you know, because you want to say expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Yes, but you can just, you could really study anything endlessly and say you’re expanding the frontiers of knowledge. Yeah, but, but we don’t have enough resources. We have to find a way to direct that. You know, there are trade offs. Right.
Sean Rasmussen [00:50:54]:
Yeah, for sure.
Geoff Horsman [00:50:55]:
So. And free market and free exchange, I think has always been the most efficient way to do that.
Sean Rasmussen [00:51:02]:
And, but you think a lot of your peers might not agree with you on that one.
Geoff Horsman [00:51:05]:
They would want, they would not agree with me. I’m, I’m certain, in fact, I know that, you know, even quote, unquote, conservative peers would still think that government, you know, there’s still statists that think that government should be involved. They just want to see it have different priorities or.
Sean Rasmussen [00:51:24]:
For sure.
Geoff Horsman [00:51:25]:
So I, you know, but yeah, I mean, if you, if, if you want to interview someone really interesting who can speak to this very like the economics of science. Yeah. Did I tell you about the, the Terence Keeley. So he wrote a book in 1996. I strongly recommend you read it. It’s called the Economic Laws of Scientific Research.
Sean Rasmussen [00:51:45]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:51:46]:
And it’s a very persuasive, very long, very, very, very detailed. But he drives a few laws of economic research. But really it’s that the growth in science is correlated to wealth. So wealthy countries, you get wealthy, you spend more money on science, you get these billionaires who then fund space telescopes and do all this, you just get more sc. Result of wealth. And also there’s a trade off. Right. So that, that government funding of, of research crowds out private investment.
Sean Rasmussen [00:52:19]:
Yeah, yeah.
Geoff Horsman [00:52:21]:
And it’s not a one to one. So it actually, you lose more private investment than you get back.
Sean Rasmussen [00:52:28]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [00:52:28]:
With public funding.
Sean Rasmussen [00:52:30]:
So, so it seems like a good idea at the time, but then it doesn’t work out in the long run.
Geoff Horsman [00:52:34]:
Right, right. Central planning is never very efficient.
Sean Rasmussen [00:52:38]:
Lawrence Krauss, the editor of the War on Science that you were in, he talks about there’s these external threats to science and internal threats and Donald Trump doing some of these executive orders could be seen as an external threat to the scientific administration or community. And whether that’s true or not, you know, we can, we can go down that road. But external political mandates are some, in some ways easier to fix because you can elect a different party and you can bring someone in who’s going to stop doing that or whatever. Whereas the problems that are going on in science right now is this internal threats, sort of culture problems with some of these ideologies that it becomes more of a matter of winning the hearts and minds of, of people in these institutions. I know that you’re actually trying to work at this. Can you tell me a bit about what you’re doing around this area to try to win hearts and minds?
Geoff Horsman [00:53:42]:
Okay, so the work that we’re doing, I guess I’m just trying to have conversations about these things because like I said, it’s actually really difficult to try to get people to engage on this issue. There’s a lot of fear. And I suppose it’s understandable. If you know that you have to take a particular political position to be in the good graces of your, your university and the TRI councils, then why would you want to even spend time having a conversation with someone who is challenging this? It’s all downside, right? Because I think probably a lot of these people, they start to think about it and there might be some cognitive dissonance, it might even be a little bit painful if you have to start engaging with the logic of these things. And it would be far more comfortable to disengage. Say, I’m too busy, I just got to do my job. Because if, if you persuade them, then they’re really incentivized not to be persuaded. So why would they expose themselves to being persuaded?
Sean Rasmussen [00:54:56]:
Because then they’re going to become one of the wrong thinkers and experience all kinds of like negative social.
Geoff Horsman [00:55:02]:
Oh, but they’re gonna have so much fun. They’re gonna meet so much more fun people. Come on. Our parties are way better. So, you know, and I actually think that that’s, that’s probably central to it is that when you, when you start to. Because what happens is at first you’re, you think you’re alone and once you start to find people who are also, who also prioritize truth, then you, you end up sort of shifting how you think and talk. You just are more forthright. You don’t worry about offending them. They can disagree with you. I think it’s kind of like our culture used to be. Not long ago we could disagree and have a beer and you could even get.
Sean Rasmussen [00:55:45]:
It’s liberating in a way, right?
Geoff Horsman [00:55:47]:
It’s, and it’s kind of fun, right? Because you know, and then you, as long as you stay humble, you can learn something, you can refine your arguments. It’s, it’s all win, win. But now we’ve moved away from that. Where we now look at, oh, this is, this belief is actually, you know, it’s like checking what do I believe? Oh, it’s in a statute somewhere. So that’s, that’s the truth. Yeah, yeah, I, I think it’s almost, it’s almost becoming that way and which is a very sad, a very sad existence.
Sean Rasmussen [00:56:20]:
It’s kind of authoritarian way of living like authoritarian followers. I had a guest on talking about left wing authoritarianism and we talked a bit about this, the climate in academia. In a way, authoritarianism requires followers. What you do is you study the followers because that’s really, there’s always going to be someone out there who wants to take advantage of and yeah, of authority. But it doesn’t really work unless there’s a bunch of people who are willing to go along with it.
Geoff Horsman [00:56:49]:
And, and that’s true. And this is, I think what gets back to those followers are enticed and enthralled and, and drawn in by kindness and politeness and being nice. And they, I think the authoritarians use don’t you want to be a good person? You don’t want to be a hateful person, do you? You don’t want to be one of those hateful people. So that’s why this niceness and kindness is incompatible with truth as a guiding philosophy. And the authoritarians have weaponized kindness and empathy and all these nice words to push a very dark agenda, in my opinion. And if you seek truth and you, and you challenge these things, then again they, they just think you’re Just a mean person and you deserve what you get.
Sean Rasmussen [00:57:43]:
Yeah, that’s loosening up a little bit now. Don’t you feel that, that there is a bit more wiggle room in terms of talking about issues like EDI or something like that?
Geoff Horsman [00:57:54]:
I think it depends.
Sean Rasmussen [00:57:55]:
Where you’re right at the epicenter of.
Geoff Horsman [00:58:00]:
Campus is not bad actually because of tenure and because, because the institution is really, you know, nominally oriented around that process of academic freedom. We still pay lip service to it or a little more than lip service. So you can, you know, I’ve never really had any, felt any serious threat. Just really more social threats and maybe sort of loose, you know, but I’ve never seriously worried about my job. But I’m quite involved with my local school school board and that system is entirely a gulag. I think it’s because universities are sort of semi private as well. You know, we’re not just fully government funded where school boards, first of all, they don’t have academic freedom. Teachers, Right. They’re just kind of much more stuck and it’s fully government funded so it’s completely ideologically taken over. I’m involved on, on my school councils. I’m involved in the, the parent council at the board level. And right now it’s even trying to get them to adhere to legislation is almost impossible. Right. There’s no. And the media doesn’t care. So there’s, they can just do what they want. They, they don’t want to put anything in writing, in an email. They’re just, it’s, they’re completely, almost just. I don’t even know how to describe how out of bounds their behavior is. But they’re just protected. There’s no competition. Our money is forcibly taken from us to fund this. There are no options. And you know, so, so that’s, I think the real central. If you want to take on organizations that are corrupt, you start with public school system.
Sean Rasmussen [00:59:48]:
And it kind of primes people for, for going along with stuff too. It was if kids as they go through this system.
Geoff Horsman [00:59:55]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I might have told at my school council that I can’t. We can’t even discuss certain topics because it could be a violation of human rights. So I mean they’re just, okay, the charter is thrown out now and we have no way to bring up all these things that are happening at schools that are, I think lies provably. I mean just like you can’t even, they’re not even attempting to discuss the evidence and they just say, yeah, we can’t talk about it, you might violate human rights. So they’re threatening you with legal action. Well implied. You know, it’s like this.
Sean Rasmussen [01:00:27]:
Yeah, for sure. There’s a bit of a threat there.
Geoff Horsman [01:00:29]:
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so that’s where we are with those clowns.
Sean Rasmussen [01:00:36]:
So are you. Are you hopeful with the work you’re doing both in school, in sort of your public schools, and also you’re also part of the Heterodox Academy. Right. And which. Which in a way is trying to remedy the situation in universities by promoting the idea of viewpoint diversity.
Geoff Horsman [01:00:53]:
Yeah.
Sean Rasmussen [01:00:54]:
Which you wouldn’t think you’d have to promote in universities because you think that people would be free to have different. Different ideas.
Geoff Horsman [01:00:59]:
But you would think, wouldn’t you? Yeah. So the Heterodox Academy has been. I think it’s been pretty useful. I mean, I. I don’t know. It’s hard to know how much we’re getting, wins little, little things. Again, how much is due to just the general thaw and. Versus what we’re doing. It’s really hard to know. But we’ve been having events. You know, the first event we had was two and a half years ago now. We had Lisa Bildy and if you know. Lisa Bildy.
Sean Rasmussen [01:01:30]:
Yes.
Geoff Horsman [01:01:30]:
A lawyer. She was a lawyer for Amy Hamm. I don’t know if you know that nurse in B.C. who put up the I Heart JK Rowling billboard.
Sean Rasmussen [01:01:39]:
Okay, yeah.
Geoff Horsman [01:01:41]:
She believes that there are two sexes in humans. And so that’s. You just can’t do that as a nurse, according to the BC nurses in middle school versus a midwife association or whatever it is. So. So she represented Amy Hamm. She’s now executive director of the Free Speech Union of Canada. Lawrence Cross is, I believe, the director or something like that. So. So we had her and that was protested. It was quite difficult. You know, we. We tried to advertise and that brought problems. It was just, you know, and we still. Still can’t really easily advertise our events.
Sean Rasmussen [01:02:20]:
In what way? Like why?
Geoff Horsman [01:02:22]:
Well, well, you can’t. So, for example, I get emails all the time through official university channels. Like, my faculty of science will say, okay, this. This faculty member is hosting some, you know, at a cinema down, you know, in town, some movie about migrants and somewhere, I don’t know, it’s, you know, it’s a very, you know, progressive film. And so the faculty of science will send it out. You know, here’s a film if you want to go see it. Or, you know, okay, fine, I guess, but a Couple years ago we had Eric Kaufman in the field. Eric Hoffman.
Sean Rasmussen [01:02:58]:
Yeah, he was actually on the, he was on Viewpoints once.
Geoff Horsman [01:03:01]:
Okay, great. So Eric and another guy from New York, Paulo Gaudiano, in what we call the heterodox conversation. So where you have people with different views on something and it was how does EDI relate to merit? Was the topic. And so I thought this was really good because this is, you have both sides, you’re able to kind of try to seek truth, find common ground like this is. I thought we were modeling what we should do. Sure. But we just couldn’t get any traction. And I, I actually sent it to my faculty of Science. It was shortly after some of these, I guess what you’d call woke messages were going out on different events. So I thought, oh, I’ll send it to my faculty of SC Science. And then it did go out. And then, you know, a few days later there’s an email from the Dean saying, I want to apologize for a message that was sent out. The faculty of science does not, does not endorse this event. They didn’t even say what it was. But clearly the, you know, the, the EDI office people, I would assume, were not too pleased that we would be having a discussion across a range of viewpoints on edi.
Sean Rasmussen [01:04:14]:
Wow.
Geoff Horsman [01:04:15]:
And you know, I think that that betrays an intellectual insecurity in, in their beliefs that they’re not, you know, they’re worried about what will happen if people start realizing what’s up.
Sean Rasmussen [01:04:24]:
Yeah. Wow.
Geoff Horsman [01:04:26]:
But, you know, but I think, you know, I haven’t tried it again recently, but we had something just three weeks ago or so. We had Mia Hughes and Morgan Auger.
Sean Rasmussen [01:04:39]:
I want to go to that. But I couldn’t for some reason.
Geoff Horsman [01:04:41]:
Yeah. And it was, I think just that that topic was discussed openly.
Sean Rasmussen [01:04:47]:
Yeah. That’s a win right on campus.
Geoff Horsman [01:04:49]:
And it wasn’t protested that’s even a year ago, but certainly two years ago. That just impossible. I, I don’t know that could have even been proposed. I mean, it just would have been a complete freak out. We would have had activists. I, I don’t know what would have happened, but it’s just so, I think these things are starting to, you know, we’re getting little wins.
Sean Rasmussen [01:05:12]:
That’s good.
Geoff Horsman [01:05:13]:
Yeah. And we’re, you know, we’re challenging things now through Senate. I said I was at Senate last week. And that’s because we have this course template that has these ideological statements. It’s got a land acknowledgement and it has a gender, you Know, an optional gender identity, gender inclusivity statement. If you want to say, you know, we’re gender inclusive, so if you want to use different pronouns, just let me know. That’s thing which is I think a, I mean effectively a religious statement in my, in my view. So we just wanted to say you should depoliticize this, this course outline. And they’re, they’re not going to do that yet. But they, we got them to put optional beside the land acknowledgment in the course outline.
Sean Rasmussen [01:05:54]:
Okay.
Geoff Horsman [01:05:54]:
Which is a big win.
Sean Rasmussen [01:05:56]:
Yeah.
Geoff Horsman [01:05:57]:
Because most people, they just, you know, it’s just there and you know, I take it off, but when I first took it off I felt, oh, this is very. It almost dangerous transgressive. Right, right. It felt like if someone notices and they call me racist. I mean now it’s just. I, I don’t. Racist doesn’t even mean anything anymore. But, but yeah, it’s optional. So that, that’s good. That’s at least something, you know, I don’t think it should be there to.
Sean Rasmussen [01:06:21]:
Begin with, but yeah, I think after what’s going on in bc, I think people are going to start to maybe rethink this whole land acknowledgement thing.
Geoff Horsman [01:06:30]:
Yeah. But I mean it’s funny that they’re just starting. It has to actually happen first till they start worrying about it. But I mean from the beginning it should have been obvious that this is a danger here. In fact, in 2021 there was a CBC article, it was citing, I think a lawyer or a judge or some prosecutor in New Brunswick saying that all these public servants making these land acknowledgment statements could be used in land claim cases. And so I think at that time the government directed civil servants to change the language about them. So now you actually notice that, Laurie, it’s more of a like honor.
Sean Rasmussen [01:07:08]:
You want to honor these people.
Geoff Horsman [01:07:10]:
Like we acknowledged the traditional terror. But even that I think.
Sean Rasmussen [01:07:14]:
Yeah.
Geoff Horsman [01:07:14]:
You know, is we’re not. What does that mean? Traditional territories.
Sean Rasmussen [01:07:18]:
Yeah, it’s all blood and soil ideology, which is really crazy.
Geoff Horsman [01:07:21]:
Yeah. And it’s very sectarian. It’s very non unifying. Yeah. So I think it’s tribal. It’s pre civilizational in many ways in my opinion. But yeah, it’s hard to make that argument.
Sean Rasmussen [01:07:35]:
If people want to find out more about these issues, where can they go? I mean they can buy the book the War on Science, which just got released and I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. But is there anything else? Any other websites or anything they can do to follow you.
Geoff Horsman [01:07:52]:
Yeah, I mean, I’m on. On X. So I guess at Horseman, Jeff. That’s Horseman with no E and Jeff with a G. They could also go to Laurier hxa. So we have a substack and that, you know, describes a lot of the things that we’re, that we’re doing. I might give a shout out to Empower. That’s also a local parents organization we have that’s really working with, trying to reform schools. That’s mpo W R. Oh boy. It’s power. If you look up in PowerConnect Parents, Waterloo Region, M P O W R. Yeah, so those things I think would be a good way to at least locally follow what we’re doing and maybe it’ll maybe inspire people elsewhere if they want to start up little groups like this. You can build them up over time and, and build community. And I think we have to sort of resort to small associations in a de tocquevillain fashion to try to take responsibility for our lives and our communities.
Sean Rasmussen [01:08:57]:
Well, thanks so much for coming on Viewpoints and for your work on preserving the role of science as a reliable source of truth.
Geoff Horsman [01:09:04]:
Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate that you’re interested and I hope it goes some way to informing people about some of these problems.
Sean Rasmussen [01:09:17]:
That’s it for this episode of Viewpoints. Thanks for listening. If you like viewpoint diversity and you want to hear more like this, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts. To find out more, visit ViewpointSpartcast CA and if you have ideas for topics or guests, we’d love to hear from you. You can connect using the contact form in the website or you can send me an email directly at seanviewpointspodcast Cat.
