Bret Weinstein appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight this week to discuss the 2017 Evergreen State College protests, claiming the school is “much worse” than it was a year ago.
The 2017 Evergreen State College protests, which centered around progressive biology Professor Bret Weinstein, involved student protesters roaming campus with baseball bats, an intentional disarming of campus police, and the university president being held hostage by students. All of this came in response to Weinstein’s refusal to participate in an activism event that asked white community members to leave campus for a day.
Weinstein told Carlson this week that Evergreen State College has become “much worse” since during the 2017 spring riots. He also claimed that the college has hired a public relations team that occasionally makes unfair criticisms of both him and his wife, former Evergreen Professor Heather Heying, in the local area newspaper, the Olympian.
Despite this bad news, Weinstein told Carlson that American public discourse has somewhat improved since the Evergreen protests. He explained that many Americans with differing political views now see themselves as allies against illiberal forces on both the far left and the far right.
Much has changed. One of the things that is most important is that the conversation is in a much different place than it was last May. We are now able to discuss issues of identity politics and although people are still inflamed on both sides of that dialogue. We are now able to have those discussions in a way that wasn’t possible last May. It seems to me that there is a recognition that the country is in danger and its being placed in danger by identity politics both on the far right and the far left. I see a movement, led in part by the Intellectual Dark Web, the Heterodox Academy, and FIRE, towards what I call the ‘patriotic center,’ where people who disagree over many issues of policy but find themselves aligned over many basic American principles.