In this episode Trent reviews Jordan Peterson’s suspension from Twitter and asks whether Catholics should push the boundaries and get “canceled” as well?
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn, and today I want to talk about the bird. What’s the word with the bird? The bird app, Twitter, and social media in general.
Trent Horn:
Is it worth it to get canceled on these apps? Because they’re not friendly to certain types of free speech. They don’t mind if people say things like burn down the Supreme Court when they’re mad about the court saying states can now protect unborn children. They’ll promote people who say anti-Semitic things.
Trent Horn:
So these apps will allow a lot of free speech that is hurtful or even can incite violence, at least in indirect ways if it’s for causes that they appreciate. But if it is for other things, the hammer comes down pretty quick and on Twitter, if you mis-gender someone, i.e. refer to them by the pronoun that matches their biological sex, rather than the gender identity they have chosen, that is a strike. Your Tweet will be… You have to delete the Tweet and your account is suspended unless you delete the Tweet and if you do that too much, you’re gone for good.
Trent Horn:
The other sin is deadnaming. Deadnaming is when you refer to someone by… Such a dramatic term, by the way. You deadnamed me, dun, dun, da. You mean I referred to you by your previous name? People change their names all the time. They’ll change whether, let’s say, you’ll change it for a stage name. Athletes do this, actors do this. Sometimes people just don’t like their name and they change it and if you refer to them by the other name, okay, whatever.
Trent Horn:
But if an individual identifies as transgender and you refer to them by their previous name, that usually, nine times out of 10 it corresponded to their biological sex, that’s called deadnaming and it’s considered like an attack on someone. And this is part of the modern age where… You remember when you were a kid? Sticks and stones can break my bones or words will never hurt me. Now people say that words are violence, which is a ridiculously crazy thing to say that words are violence because if words are violence and you are allowed…
Trent Horn:
Think about this, this isn’t controversial. It is appropriate to use violence to prevent violence. Like if someone… There is a movie with Seth Rogan called American Pickle. Kind a weird movie but it’s an interesting movie, I liked it. And he plays this character from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. He says, “You will do this or there will be violence. There will be violence.” I remember that from the movie. That’s kind of Borat what I was doing there.
Trent Horn:
But normally you think, look, if someone is about to punch me or they are attacking me physically, I can use violence in response. Maybe I’ll use the minimal training I have in muay thai and jujitsu. I’ll probably get wrecked because I don’t have enough training but I could use it. If someone uses violence against me, I can use an appropriate level of violence back.
Trent Horn:
Now, if someone just punches me, I can’t just kill them. I can’t just snap their neck or something like that, but an appropriate level. But you’re allowed to meet violence with violence. That’s if violence is physical, physical violence. But if words are violence, if people say that, if you say that… We’re going to talk today about Jordan Peterson being suspended for deadnaming and mis-gendering Elliot Page, who was formerly known as Ellen Page, an actress who appeared in films like Juno where she played a pregnant teenager, that if you deadname or mis-gender someone, then that is an act of violence and it is just the same as punching someone in the face, is an act of violence.
Trent Horn:
That would create a barbaric world to live in. It would basically go back to the 17th century where you could dual someone. That if you dishonored somebody that was considered an act of violence and you could challenge them to a dual. “You have dishonored me I challenge you to a dual.” And people were shooting each other over slights.
Trent Horn:
That if words are violence, then you can reply with violence. That if deadnaming someone is like punching them in the face, then if you can punch someone back if they try to punch you, why can’t you use physical violence if there is a word a person uses you disagree with? If words are violence that is, I mean, it’s crazy if it descends down this rabbit hole but that’s where things are going.
Trent Horn:
So I want to talk about today, cancellation that happens on these social media platforms if you speak the truth about reality. Is it worth it? Is it not worth it? How should we look at that? I’ll tell you what’s going on here. The headline for the New York Post, this was June 30th, by the way, and if there’s an update in the story, I apologize if I don’t have it. I’m recording this now, July, I don’t know where… So by the time this episode airs this might be a month later, who knows what will transpire? So just bear with me.
Trent Horn:
But I mean, this stories play out the same way. This is always going to keep on happening. Twitter suspends Jordan Peterson for Tweet about Elliot Page’s trans sin. So the idea here is you see the Tweet here talking about Elliot Page. “Remember when pride was a sin and Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
Trent Horn:
I would say that a physician that amputates a healthy organ because a person has an identity disorder, that physician should be held criminally responsible, especially if they do it to minors. That goes against the Hippocratic Oath. I’m sorry, you are amputating a healthy organ because a person has an identity disorder. Should physicians start paralyzing people? People who have body identity integrity disorder who want to be paralyzed, even though they’re perfectly healthy?
Trent Horn:
We would see that’s mutilation. How is cutting off someone’s breasts or cutting off their penis? How is that not just as bad? It’s mutilation, but you can’t say that. So it says, “Jordan Peterson has reportedly been suspended from Twitter following a post about, let’s see here, transgender actor Elliot Page that broke the platform’s rules of conduct.”
Trent Horn:
It goes on to talk about what he did and then I think he said here that he would rather… Does this cover it out in this article? It says that he would rather… I don’t think I see it here. Let’s see. He said later that he would rather die than delete his own tweet. That’s what Twitter makes you do and I’ll talk about this when I talk about Matt Walsh and other things. They’ll say, “We’re not going to suspend you, just delete your Tweet.”
Trent Horn:
It’s an added insult injury, they don’t just do it for you. So they’ve also booted the Babylon B for doing this thing. The Babylon B talked about… Who was it? It was someone in health services. It was Levine, that General who was a transgender woman saying that that individual was man of the year, and Babylon B got booted for that.
Trent Horn:
Now this is something that’s interesting here in the article, the Pew Research Center survey found that 60% of adults say a person’s gender is determined by their sex assigned at birth. That’s a four point increase from the previous year in 2021 and a six point spike from 54% in 2017. So I think that this movement of authoritarianism to enforce transgender ideology, it is backfiring. People want to be tolerant. In America, they want to be tolerant, live and let live but tolerance goes both ways that if you’re going to tolerate one view, you should tolerate another. Just let people live their lives.
Trent Horn:
But if you’re going to ban them from society, ban them from major social media platforms just because they have a different view. Not even that they have attacked someone but they have a different view about the nature of reality. People don’t want to… They don’t like the idea. They can be fired from their jobs, banished from social media, ostracized for holding a view that humanity has held for thousands of years about the nature of men and women.
Trent Horn:
And so I think that this is backfiring. It’s one thing to say, “Please don’t kill us, abuse us, beat us up.” Transgender individuals, we shouldn’t be killing, beating or abusing. Anyway, you shouldn’t even be verbally berating someone. You should be kind to people but you should also say, “But you are not a man or you are not a woman because a man and a woman are two different things, that’s determined by biology.” So I definitely think this is backfiring here in this regard.
Trent Horn:
This reminds me though back when Matt Walsh was suspended from Twitter. So this was in January of 2022 and he was suspended there, let’s see, I think I have a clip here of him on Tucker Carlson right after his… He just found out he’d been suspended from Twitter and he went on Tucker Carlson. So here’s the clip.
Matt Walsh:
I have to mention because I just found out five minutes ago, right before we went on the air that I just got suspended on Twitter because I pointed out that biological males are men. And this to me is all part of the game here. That this is what leftism is and if you criticize it, then they’re going to shut you down because they realize that it’s not like they can engage intellectually. It’s not like they can defend intellectually any of the examples that you just played, so this is the only option they have.
Trent Horn:
He’s right. And I’ve done an episode on this on my podcast, the one thing that the left fears the most, and that would be open debates. They refused to be involved in my debate with Nathan Nobis on abortion. These subjects will say there is no debate. I’m sorry, there is a debate and you’re losing, by the way, as public opinion shifts away from transgender ideology. Because you want to enforce the ideology through force rather than through open debate and dialogue, which is what pro-life advocates, what Christians have been doing, and we are seeing the fruits and benefits of that.
Trent Horn:
So Walsh got suspended, I forget the exact Tweet that he said. Here, let me move this over just a little bit. Well actually, everyone in… Alrighty. Then he appeared on Matt Walsh’s podcast, this was February 28th, 2022. And he talked about it and Walsh actually talked about his decision to stay on Twitter and delete the offending Tweets. I’m going to play that clip for you.
Matt Fradd:
Some have said you’re a bit of a coward for taking down those Tweets because my understanding was that Twitter said to you, “Once you take down these offensive Tweets, we’ll let you back on.” And I wasn’t actually sure what you do about that. Whether you would just give them the finger and say, “I refuse to.” But you did take them down. Have you received much criticism for what some have, maybe not many perhaps, but phrased as you kind of bowing to Twitter?
Matt Walsh:
A little bit. I find that criticism would be a little bit silly. Maybe some people don’t understand the behind the scenes of it. One thing you have to understand here, and I didn’t even actually know this myself until it happened to me, is that they censor the tweets before they tell you to take them down. They’ve already done it themselves. They’ve already censored them and then they say, kind of as just this ritual actually, that you have to delete them. It’s sort of a moot point for all practical reasons at that point.
Matt Walsh:
And then the other question is just, all right, well, if Twitter was telling me I have to issue an apology and renounce what I’ve said, well, that’s a totally different situation. Of course, I would never do that. I would literally rather be dead than come out and renounce my belief in biological science or any kind of truth.
Matt Walsh:
But in this case, you’re not required to make any kind of statement, to admit anything. They’re just saying, “We’ve already censored it, we just need you to hit that button there.” And so you can take a stand and, as you say, raise your finger to Twitter, but is that really raising a finger to Twitter because then your stand is, “Okay, I’m just not going to be on Twitter anymore.” You’re erased from the platform. They’ve gotten rid of your voice, which is what they want. So you can raise the finger all you want but you’re giving them exactly what they want, which is-
Trent Horn:
And I think Walsh is right here. Now one, I think Catholics are not obligated to be on social media and probably should not be. I question whether I should be on as much as I am. It’s a toxic place and I think you have to be very discerning the time that you spend there. So I think if you choose to not be on social media, good for you. Good for you for living in the real world. But for me, I appreciate social media because it’s a place where I can reach out to people.
Trent Horn:
Honestly, my favorite thing to do on Twitter is to find people who say, “I think I want to be Catholic,” and I send them a free book. That’s amazing. 30 years ago, I would’ve never met that person, would’ve never met that person. But through social media, I can see there’s somebody who says… They can write on Twitter, “I’m thinking of becoming Catholic. I really wish I had Trent Horn’s book, Why We’re Catholic.”
Trent Horn:
And so if I search Trent Horn and see that they mentioned me, I can say, “Hey, hi, I’m Trent Horn. Here’s my book for free. Read it, I hope it helps you. That reason for me alone is enough to be on social media and I have sent out books to… If you follow me on social media, you’ll know I send out free stuff on social media all the time. I love it. I think that’s great.
Trent Horn:
So for me, it is well worthwhile to be on social media, just that I can reach people who genuinely are interested in Catholicism that I would never reach before and I can send them free copies of my books. So for me, it is well worth it just to be there. If it was toxic for me, I would just stop posting, but I would just keep looking for these people and I would just hop in, offer them a book, and hop back off.
Trent Horn:
I’ve gotten more onto Twitter lately but I try not to get into Twitter wars and things like that. I’ll post things, but I also think it can be helpful for people to share particular perspectives. And I agree with Walsh, if I said something and Twitter said, “You must apologize and say, ‘Elliot Page is a man.'” I would say, “No, I’m not going to do that. Sorry, I’m not going to say a lie. I’m not going to do something evil.” But he’s right that if a Tweet is deleted and you just have to click a button that says, “I acknowledge that it’s been deleted.” Okay, fine. You deleted it, whatever.
Trent Horn:
And so if I can still do good, I think it’s worth it to be there. I think it’s helpful if you do want to just get canceled. I think that can be worth it if you were canceled for a completely absurd reason and it creates a lot of publicity to show, wow, they really went too far and canceled something that makes absolutely no sense for them to cancel whatsoever. Like for example, when Ellen Page, the former name of Elliot Page. Now I acknowledge, I will say Elliot Page because that is a legal reality. Your name is a legal reality. You can change it, fine. You can legally change your name but you cannot change your sex. You can’t stop being a man or a woman, but people can change their name to all sorts of crazy things. So I don’t feel bad calling someone by their new legal name. There might be cases where I’m not okay with it, but here, your name is what the government records your name to be and people have weird names. Sex is different. That’s biological.
Trent Horn:
So if I took Elliot Page. Imagine, there was a time on Twitter where it was trending. Ellen Page was trending and people said, “Looks like Twitter has to ban itself. It deadnamed Elliot Page.” If I just took a screen grab of that trending on Twitter and posted it and then got banned. Well, that would be hilarious. Although I think I would still push, I would still acknowledge the delete but to point out, look, even your own rules, you can’t even follow them.
Trent Horn:
So to summarize my position, I think it’s fine to not be on social media. I think it’s fine to… I also think it’s fine to get banned and stay banned like Babylon B to show, “Hey, this is wrong,” and you want to make your position known. But that’s really more helpful if you have other avenues. Babylon B has YouTube still, they have other ways to reach people so I think that’s fine.
Trent Horn:
But I also think it’s fine to get a slap on the wrist from Twitter. Click that, yes, you deleted it because of you’re dumb rules, and then go back on and reach people. Should you try to get canceled? I think it’s fine to push the envelope, but you should do it in creative ways that make them look silly. I think that would be some of the best ways if you’re going to try to get canceled. Otherwise I think what you really should try to do is to use these platforms to accomplish as much good as possible and then try to do as much good and then also point out the evil that they do.
Trent Horn:
So I hope that was helpful for you all and yeah, if there was an update to the story, I’ll try to mention it. I mean, who knows? Maybe Jordan Peterson later deleted the Tweet to get back on Twitter. I don’t know. Obviously this is a bit out of date. I’m recording ahead and I’m dealing with my own technical issues here. Please pray that all gets resolved.
Trent Horn:
Thank you guys very much and I just hope you have a very blessed day.
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