Tag Archives: Covid-19

Larry Arnn teaches

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On 19 February this year in Phoenix, Arizona, there was a National Leadership Seminar held by Hillsdale College.

Regular readers might roll their eyes and moan “Hillsdale again?” to which my reply is that if anyone would be so kind as to show me other places where live people were delivering live speeches in the flesh to live audiences these days, I’d be glad to explore those also. In the meantime I shall continue to mine this seam.

Today’s subject is one I have been craving to examine, because he comes as close as anyone to personifying Hillsdale College. He would probably deny that because he seems to be a Primus Inter Pares character, but as President of Hillsdale College he appears to have imprinted it with his own personality. He is Larry P. Arnn.

In several recent postings on this blog he has introduced speakers with a brilliance which kindled my interest, and then recently that kindling was inflamed when I happened upon this interview with him from about four years ago. I commend it.

But for now I am looking at this speech…

I’ve seen Timothy Caspar introducing before, because he is a Hillsdale lecturer of politics, and on the other occasions he read his introduction. Introductions are often read, not just because they are full of important biographical data but because it is a wise policy to ask speakers to write their own introduction. That way the speaker sets his own starting blocks as he wants them, is responsible for accuracy and relevance, and the introducer is saved an invidious task. On this occasion however Caspar is introducing a long-standing colleague and friend, is mostly shooting his own reminiscences from the hip, and doing it well. Why, you may ask, is he then periodically looking down at the lectern? My considered answer is that this is mainly comfort-habit.

Arnn kicks off with a photograph of his grand-daughter. Don’t you hate people who do that? I am skilled at oh-so-subtly flashing the wallpaper picture on my phone, showing surprise that anyone spotted it and then basking in the doting chorus of “aah!”.

This speech was delivered three days before I published this post, and Arnn begins with recalling his friendship with the same deceased subject. You may assume that to be a self-indulgent, mawkish diversion from what he is there to say. If so, you haven’t heard it yet. In that segment he teaches us more about the ethos of Hillsdale College and its approach to education than a brochure could ever tell you.

[At 14:54 he unwittingly sent a personal message to me. I had been surprised and a little disappointed that he had looked down at his lectern quite often, especially in the early part of the talk. Was he regularly and unnecessarily consulting his notes, or was this also a habit? At 14:54 he gave me the answer: it was habit. I knew that because now when he consulted his notes to see if he had missed anything he looked down through his spectacles – which he hadn’t done before.]

At 18:25 he turns to what he calls ‘the bad stuff’, and so begins an analysis of the way the USA was designed to be governed and how that design has become corrupted. With a few minor adjustments he could be talking about the UK, and even when the technicalities are US-specific it’s still interesting, so the lesson is absorbing even for this Brit. I summarise what I learnt in the fault stemming from ignorance. Unscrupulous people have got away with crimes because those who could have stopped them were ignorant of their power to do so. Therefore everything goes back to education and its failings (or deliberate infantilisation of students), and we all see that happening on this side of the Atlantic also.

In his introduction Timothy Caspar described Arnn as “always teaching”. Ain’t that the truth! – this speech is evidence. Part of ‘always teaching’ is always learning, constantly seeking out more to study. Caspar also told us that Arnn was a student of the life and work of Winston Churchill, and for the final section of this speech Arnn turns to him. Suddenly I, an Englishman, am being told by an American a story about Churchill that I didn’t know.

What a magnificent closing!

Nick Hudson disentangles

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BizNews held their Inaugural Investment Conference on 18 March this year. The conference was addressed by Nick Hudson, Chairman of PANDA.

The introduction is delivered by Alec Hogg, founder and publisher of BizNews and self-described “disruptive media entrepreneur”.

My trainees, and indeed readers of my book, The Face & Tripod will spot that Hogg has Something to Say in addition to merely telling us about Nick Hudson. He also shoots it from the hip. So far so good, except he is popping his microphone. This is partly his fault inasmuch as he is speaking too directly into the mic, but also he needs to be advised that these days there are microphones that are virtually pop-proof.

Hudson is heard speaking at 1:57, about five seconds before he is faded in on the video. It’s an unusual and appealing production detail which I applaud, but it also prompts me to make a less complimentary comment concerning the staging of this talk. I have already criticised the lectern microphone (or at least its use); I now must say something about the stage lighting.

Hudson is a pacer. He likes to pace to and fro while he speaks, and I have no quarrel with that. I have found over the years that there are people who are simply better at thinking on their feet if those feet happen to be moving. The trouble here is that this makes him go in and out of the stage lighting. Actors and professional speakers learn to love their light and stay within it, and Hudson could do the same, but why should he? He is expert in his own speciality and is entitled to think that those staging this conference are expert in theirs.

The solution is not completely straightforward. There are illuminated screens on that stage whose distinctiveness could be faded if the whole stage was covered with a bright wash of light, and that would be regrettable, but lighting people are good at getting around this sort of issue. I suspect that what went wrong was that they didn’t know that Hudson would be a pacer. A technical rehearsal would have told them.

I’m being very picky here but, as I have said often enough on this blog, the better they are the pickier I get. That creative bit of editing that caused Hudson to be seen in this video after he was first heard signifies a conscientious production team, so I bet they were tearing their hair out over the lighting – but by then it was too late. It didn’t make me tear my hair, it was just something I noticed.

The reason for my equanimity is that the speech itself is so refreshing. Those like me who are bloody-minded enough to be dissatisfied with the ghastly uniform mush that is spewed out by the media, and take the trouble to seek out the actual data for ourselves, will have few surprises in Hudson’s general gist: the surprise is in his being allowed to say it and our being able to hear it through the censoring stranglehold that grips all news these days. This video has of course been taken off YouTube because, his being an actuary and therefore highly skilled at disentangling such matters, he has brought all our suspicions into ultra-high focus and crushed most of the lies we have been told.

When will people get it through their heads that by silencing, or attempting to silence, a contrary opinion they weaken their own credibility? The truth will eventually come out; they must know the truth will come out; the most worrying thing is that they might be attempting to achieve something else first (it’s a familiar pattern). If that something else depends on the temporary preservation of a pack of lies it doesn’t say anything encouraging about the nature of that something else.

Scott Atlas “friendly for a change”

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In February Hillsdale College, which more and more not only supplies speeches for me to examine but also appears to be an oasis of sense in a desert of academic lunacy, hosted a talk by Dr Scott Atlas.

Dr Atlas is preceded by two introductions, or more accurately an introduction and a speech. The preliminary welcome and introduction is, I believe, from Timothy Caspar. It is clear and workmanlike, though read. He is followed at 1:55 by the President of the college, Larry P. Arnn.

I like this man. I like his style and approach, his banter with his colleagues and assistants, his apparent approach to running a college, and of course his relaxed through clear shooting-from-the-hip speaking style. I also happen to share his views on most things. All this is just as well because his introduction is a mini-speech, and not so mini being more than a quarter of an hour long. He doesn’t actually get to the matter of Dr Atlas till ten minutes in, but it doesn’t matter because what precedes that is so absorbing. And the actual introduction, when it comes, appears beautifully unorthodox till you realise it’s actually leading up to the presentation of an award.

Atlas begins at 18:45 and during his opening preamble he tells the audience “It’s great to be in a crowd that is friendly for a change”.

He is script-bound which I regret but understand. He almost certainly believes, as do many, that a script ensures that you tell your story more precisely and concisely; and that therefore it is safer. I don’t share that belief, but can understand that in his circumstances he has become seriously risk-averse. This is a man under persecution.

As his story unfolds his passion builds, first below the surface but eventually becoming overt. He is angry, and in danger of falling into a trap that we’ve met before… speak when you are angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret... and his story makes it very clear why he is angry. Nevertheless he keeps his passion in check enough to remain coherent while making it clear to us that he is accustomed to having this message resisted ferociously.

I’ve been around the block a few times – I believe I am officially classified as ‘elderly’ – and there are a few reliable guidelines I’ve learnt over the years. One of them is that when any government policy receives bipartisan support it will probably fail the sniff-test. A close relative of that, originally learnt in the school playground, is that when someone makes a statement and then refuses to argue it and instead resorts to name-calling it is a safe bet that they have no argument and are lying through their teeth. Combine those two guidelines, in fact reinforce mere name-calling with government edicts by mainstream-media-muscle and police activity, and you have something dangerous. We have seen such a scenario being acted out during this pandemic and this is exactly what Dr Atlas is describing.

It is a hugely important speech and warrants close attention. It ends at 43:45, and shortly before the end his demeanour relaxes as the friendliness of the audience cheers him. In his closing he actually pays tribute to precisely this.

The speech is followed by Q&A; and this is when he really relaxes, raises his eyes to the audience, is not one jot less coherent now that he is speaking spontaneously, and becomes even cheerful. One of the early questions enables him to explain that his last words of the speech, “Rise up!” did not mean street rebellion but applying electorate pressure to political and official representatives across the field from local to federal.

I commend the entire video.

Kristi Noem and the power of freedom.

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Hillsdale College has featured on this blog in the past and, my having looked down their list of recent speakers, will undoubtedly feature again. Last October, they invited the Governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem to talk about Liberty and the Pandemic.

Since I first discovered this speech and had decided to critique it here, Noem has faced wide criticism for refusing to sign a bill that she had previously expressed herself “excited about”. This is a bill to prevent biological males from competing in women’s sports. Quite often this sort of story turns out to have involved a piece of proposed legislation that contained a political trap, so to learn more I found this short interview that you may want to watch.

For the moment though we are concentrating on this speech …

The introduction is made by Larry Arnn, the President of the college, and it is an exceedingly good one. Being himself a proper speaker he shoots it from the hip, includes some well-received humour including in-jokes that only his audience will fully understand, and makes him an excellent warm-up for the top of the bill. He includes one particular sentence which should belong in all treasuries of aphorisms “expert knowledge is narrow knowledge”.

Noem begins at 2:50, opening with some spontaneous personal observations. Being spontaneous they are shot from the hip, and being shot from the hip they are spontaneous. Here she is speaking at the top of her game. I use that phrase, “top of her game” not to highlight great oratory, because her delivery is relatively quiet and restrained, but because her sincerity is brilliantly transparent.

Shortly after the five-minute mark she swings into her prepared speech. Now her eyes periodically drop to the lectern. She’s using a script, or at least notes, and just a little of the edge comes off her game.

I used to join in an online group of speaking trainers, but I soon jumped out because it emerged that they all espoused the fallacy that a speaker has to have a script, and were not prepared even to listen to a contrary view. Regular readers of the blog know that I am fiercely of the opinion that paper reduces a speaker’s effectiveness, and that everyone is capable of throwing their paper away. They merely need to know how to structure their material to make paper redundant and also to have it proved to them that they can – and do – speak better without it.

Noem uses paper, but so well that its damage is very slight. She merely glances at it from time to time, making me feel that it’s there more as a comfort blanket than a source of material. How I wish she’d let me take it from her. She would learn the power of another type of freedom.

With all that this is a very fine speech. She uses a pleasing pattern of pretending that she, the audience, and the hall are all in South Dakota and that she is welcoming them. In fact her whole speech and her demeanour seem carry a warm welcome. It’s very effective.

Her speech finishes at 17:10 when she goes over to Q&A.

The Cambridge lockdown debate

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On 28 January, The Cambridge Union conducted a live-streamed debate on the motion, “This House Believes Lockdown Was A Mistake“. The speakers were Sir Graham Brady, Laura Spinney, Richard Tice, Phil Whitaker, Toby Young and Layla Moran.

This blog having brought me to the attention of people overseas, I began a few years ago delivering distance coaching via video link. In the early days it was rather clunky, but trial, error and perseverance prevailed. Though passionately involved with my work I was not getting any younger, and I fondly imagined that virtually trotting around the world delivering speaking training from my study was a reasonable recipe for semi-retirement. Then came Covid and lockdowns.

Somehow word quickly spread that I was a specialist in delivering training by video link and my semi-retirement got busy. When it’s distance training it makes little difference if the person on the other end is in East Africa or West Sussex. Also delivering training via a computer screen nurtured a byproduct skill that was useful now that people wanted to learn how to deliver speeches via a computer screen. There’s quite a list of guidelines, but I’ll restrict here to the essential three.

  • Framing: arrange yourself and the camera so that your face is mainly in the top third of the screen.
  • Lighting: in front of you not behind.
  • Eyes: ay there’s the rub, because in video-link eye-contact is an illusion. If you look at their eyes you appear not to. Look at the camera.

So firstly let’s see how the speakers did on those principles.

Framing: all fairly good, though Spinney and Young were the best. Whitaker would have been ok if he’d sat up, but he looked as if he’d crawled into frame.

Lighting: Moran was startlingly brilliant. The others were good except Spinney whose lighting couldn’t have been worse. I wonder whether she is shy. (I’m not joking: I work often with bright and successful people who are shy. Intelligence and shyness dwelling in the same person is a miserable combination for them.)

Eyes: Sir Graham, script-bound, is conforming to the politician’s habit of reading and looking up periodically at the audience. His assumption is that the audience is on the screen, so we never get his eyes. Spinney is speaking spontaneously and extremely well, but the light is so bad that I can’t really see her eyes. Tice, script-bound, is using the same routine as Sir Graham, except better because when he looks up he looks at the camera. Whitaker’s eyes are all over the place: script, screen, the wall, barely the camera. He does himself no favours as the resultant effect is perceived insincerity. Young is shooting from the hip, with eyes locked firmly on the camera. Moran’s eyes are locked on and she is so slick that, reinforced by other symptoms, I suspect autocue.

Briefly, because this is already getting long, I will address some of what was said. Sir Graham was not just the first but the last to speak, and he accurately summed up a general feeling that had pervaded both sides of this debate. The first lockdown may have been justified because of the dearth of data at the time, but the subsequent ones indicate at best a failure. He reasons and argues very well, as befits an experienced politician.

Laura Spinney speaks with us (that italicised preposition is one of my hobby horses). It’s an excellent skill which makes the hearer want to listen. Apart from the stygian darkness, this is my joint favourite speech.

Richard Tice, has well-marshalled arguments that show their workings – and the workings include some explosive revelations. Being script-bound he sadly loses much of his relationship with his audience, and that isn’t helped by his adopting a phoney, am-dram, emotive tone.

Phil Whitaker begins by telling us what Covid 19 is. It seems not to have dawned on him that over the past year we have kind of gathered all that stuff that he wastes valuable time telling us. In that pointless preamble he implies that the virus is novel in that it can sometimes cause no symptoms. How does he know that is novel? How often has there been a government project to mass-test perfectly healthy people for signs of an infection? “Asymptomatic” surely means “healthy”.

Laurence J. Peter‘s second most famous pronouncement, “Speak when you are angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret” nearly applies to Toby Young’s contribution. Having spent months compiling a huge assembly of competing expert opinions on this matter, along with mountains of data, he has formed a view and is able to dispense with a script and speak straight to the camera. Arguments backed up with facts, figures, and quotes from peer-reviewed papers are fired in volleys straight at us. He does get a little too worked up towards the end, nearly causing his case to unravel, but he just manages to hold it together. It’s compulsive watching.

Layla Moran’s advent is startling. Production values including the lighting are brilliant. It’s almost too good. I have in the past had occasion to warn in this blog against perfectionism because if you smooth away every edge you risk sterilising the product. In this case, despite admiring those production values I dislike the speech because of the data torturing. If you quote bald numbers to promote a case, without comparing them to some sort of control, you are merely decorating a shop window. Her opening salvo is cheap and unworthy. All that said, I do admire the elegance of the anadiplosis that begins at 1:04:05.

For the record, the Proposition won the debate.

Jonathan Sumption’s coherent sense

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People are not making speeches at the moment, for reasons I don’t need to explain. For this blog I can mine reserves of historic speeches, and I have done so, but part of the interest I get from critiquing speeches is to learn what views and arguments people are currently promoting.

On the other hand people are being interviewed. The essential difference with an interview is that the speaker is fed questions which dictate the direction of the conversation; and it is a very large part of the public speaking skill to address the direction your conversation would have taken had the audience been able to dictate it.

Lord Sumption, erstwhile Supreme Court Justice, has made no secret of his disapproval of the government’s policies concerning Covid 19, and here is an interview on the subject. It was broadcast in May of this year.

I’ll admit that I did have an actual speech that Sumption had made a few years ago, but I decided against covering it because the subject matter was way out of date and because to my intense irritation he slavishly read every syllable of the wretched thing.

You will see that I have supplied a link to that discarded speech in order that students of public speaking can see for themselves that, by reading it, Sumption made himself not a jot more articulate than he is being here in this interview, while sacrificing a huge portion of the perceived sincerity that spontaneity would have granted. But back to this interview …

What would be beyond belief had we not experienced it is that this interview, and Sumption’s excellently articulated arguments in it, were broadcast half a year ago and politicians are still pursuing the same asinine policies. How dare they have the impertinence to arrogate the right to consider Christmas to be within their gift!

It is not only disgraceful it is politically foolish. The arguments they promote in the name of “science” have become visibly and risibly threadbare and widely debunked by substantial scientific authority. The various degrees of lockdown have done manifestly more damage, not only culturally, socially and economically, but even medically, than the coronavirus ever could. This is vandalism conducted behind a smokescreen of a disease whose puny fatality rate is losing ground to that of hay fever.

The trouble with official idiocy on this scale is that conspiracy theories take hold. When no one is capable of being quite this stupid the only apparent explanation is that there is something else going on. And there are some very plausible and alarming explanations being aired which, if they are only slightly true, suggest that the people concerned are dangerous lunatics.

America’s Frontline Doctors heard

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On 27 July, on the steps of the US Supreme Court in Washington DC, a group of white-coated people gathered to conduct a press conference. They called themselves America’s Frontline Doctors, and their videoed presentation was introduced by Congressman Ralph Norman from South Carolina. Within a handful of hours the video had gone viral, and within twenty-four hours it had been banned by social media companies.

Have the cretins who order these bans never heard of the Streisand Effect? The immediate impact of the banning is to invite the question “why?”, and in searching for an answer to “why” far more people go out of their way to listen than would otherwise have done. I am one of them.

Mark Zuckerberg, in answer to a question at a Congressional hearing, said

We do prohibit content that will lead to imminent risk of harm…

Sounds reasonable, but who decides? I am prepared to believe that there is a Facebook medical panel. I am unable to list any of its members, but I am able to list the doctors in this video.


Ralph Norman hands over to Dr Simone Gold. We later hear from Dr Bob Hamilton, Dr Stella Immanuel, Dr James Todaro, and Dr Joseph Ladapo. They are worth hearing, making “why?” even more of a conundrum.

I spent a little time searching for doctors who had arguments to gainsay the ones in this video, and merely found several people targeting these doctors with argumentum ad hominem. I also found several more doctors saying very much the same thing as these.

Furthermore, I found this short video concerning the infamous article in The Lancet which was pulled only a few days after publication.

Nothing that I found proved that the doctors in the video (shooting all their speeches from the hip by the way) are right or that they are wrong, but it did suggest that there is an important debate to be had on the matter. It is always foolish not to pay close attention to information coming to you from the coalface, and even more foolish to act to silence it.

So finding myself still asking “why?” I ask myself Cui Bono? – who benefits? The only answer I can find is anyone who stands to gain from extending the crisis or from producing another prevention or cure and, in view of the medical, social and economic costs of this pandemic in the mean time, there are no pretty answers to that.

P.S. On 6 August it emerged that both Facebook and Twitter had censored the following video on the grounds that it contained “false claims”. Again, who decides? Is their information superior to that available to POTUS?