May 7, 2021 - Epoch Times
07:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Let's talk a little bit about the university, because you just mentioned deciding to resign. | |
| Part of your story is just how the university dealt with this. | |
| And I think this is also kind of a window into the broader cancel culture. | |
| Can you tell me a bit about that? | |
| Absolutely. | |
| The process is under Title IX, and it happens at universities all over the country. | |
| And in fact, Betsy DeVos, who was the Education Secretary for the United States was trying to fix it because the way that it has been working in many cases over the past several years is such that the accused have virtually no rights and the accusers have all the rights and so it's this uneven playing field. | |
| Let me be more specific. | |
| In my case, I was not allowed to have a lawyer present While I was being grilled and interrogated by a lawyer, I was not allowed to record the proceedings. | |
| So it was essentially a black box, which, by the way, is especially troubling that you can't record a proceeding because even in the criminal justice system, they've tried to make fixes so that, in other words, when police interrogate somebody, they have to usually record it at this point to avoid abuses in the system. | |
| But I wasn't allowed to record it. | |
| Furthermore, I had hundreds of people who could have spoken to my character and my conduct, but I was not allowed to produce any of them because I was told that they were character witnesses. | |
| But how do you prove a negative if you can't even produce the people who could speak to your conduct? | |
| What's more, the people who were accusing me, I was not allowed to face any of my accusers. | |
| And to even try to understand what they were saying. | |
| And furthermore, I wasn't allowed to receive any of the documentation. | |
| I mean, they gave it to me for a second to look at it. | |
| They let me glance at it. | |
| But I wasn't allowed to have copies of it. | |
| And then they would just sort of grab it out of my hand. | |
| And that was the end of it. | |
| Now, this is not specific to the university where I am. | |
| This is the way it works at multiple universities. | |
| And we know for a fact that this has been problematic for not just professors, But for students who have been accused and whose lives have been destroyed over false accusations, it's really kind of a silent epidemic, I think, in many ways, because, as you may recall, at the height of the Me Too movement, the notion was all women are to be believed. | |
| And I have to tell you, I don't care what the demographic is, but I don't think any particular demographic, all of them, should be believed. | |
| Not all men should be believed. | |
| Not all women should be believed. | |
| There should be due process so that it has to do with the evidence, so that there is some sort of actual vetting of the process to make sure that there's some justice here. | |
| But I have to say, I actually had fewer rights than if I had been accused of murder. | |
| But that's the situation I was in, and it was, in my opinion, utterly unfair and without any real justice in the process. | |
| But that is the process that a lot of people go through right now. | |
| And so was there ever a verdict in your case, or I don't know if it's even called a verdict? | |
| So the short version is that The university essentially compelled me to go through this process. | |
| They said because I was an employee, I had to go through this process. | |
| They were feeling pressure, the university was, from the attack group, which was publicly saying that the university wasn't doing enough about Me Too and those related issues. | |
| And so they felt that they had to do something. | |
| So in the end, this came down to... | |
| One investigator. | |
| So, in other words, this one investigator was the one who was both the jury, well, actually the judge, the jury, and the executioner in this case. | |
| At first, this same investigator came to me when she had been approached by this attack group, and she said that none of the allegations, even if true, rose to the level of a policy violation. | |
| And she said, literally, you know, I'm putting it in a draw, you'll never hear from me again. | |
| The next day, When the attack group went to the media and put it out on the media, suddenly I was under investigation by that very same investigator who said that none of this rose to the level of a policy violation. | |
| So at the end of this process, which went on for months, This investigator, in her opinion, although she pointed to no evidence, said that I had violated some policies involving a small handful of individuals out of the larger group. | |
| So in most cases, there was no policy violation that she determined, but she did in some cases. | |
| She said that I had the right to appeal that decision and it was at that point that I'd spent months on this and I had many lawyers involved that I decided that there was no point and so I voluntarily withdrew from the process and I also voluntarily resigned from the university, which turned out to be the right decision. | |
| These were, of course, highly consequential things to say about Northwestern University and its internal processes, so we reached out to see what they had to say in response. | |
| We heard from Northwestern's Assistant VP of Communications, who wrote to us saying that Northwestern University, quote,"...takes seriously all complaints that are brought to its attention. | |
| Northwestern conducted a thorough and impartial investigation following established university procedures." The university concluded the investigation in June 2018. | |
| Kline no longer works for Northwestern. | |
| So you've just watched a clip from an American Thought Leader's interview, and as you probably know, I pour my heart and soul into these. | |
| YouTube has been censoring some entirely mainstream videos lately, including things like Florida Governor DeSantis' coronavirus roundtable. | |
| We've even had some of our own videos removed from YouTube for no clear reason whatsoever. | |
| And frankly, I don't find this to be appropriate. | |
| I don't find this to be acceptable. | |
| I don't want to be sitting around thinking what YouTube may or may not feel like they want to censor. | |
| And beyond that even, YouTube has demonetized us for the past two months. | |
| Ostensibly, we're working to resolve the issue, but our hopes are kind of fading when it comes to this. | |
| So what is our response to this? | |
| Well, we've started our own platform, Epoch TV. Now, Epoch TV is the premium Epoch Times video platform. | |
| It's got American Thought Leaders, but it also has The Larry Elder Show and Crossroads with Joshua Phillip and a number of other programs. | |
| So you can get Epoch TV for this low introductory rate of $4.99 a month. | |
| And in so doing, you're actually supporting the Epoch Times as an organization. | |
| You're supporting uncensored news. | |
| You're supporting groundbreaking investigative reporting. | |
| And you're supporting these deep dive interviews that I love doing so much. |
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