Ep. 132 - The Fight For Free Speech On Campus ft. Lt. Gov. Dan Forest
The majority of college students oppose free speech, according to recent polls. Yet left-wing commentators want to gaslight us all and insist that the campus free speech crisis is nothing more than a myth. We’ll analyze the facts and discuss what can be done about it with North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, a driving force behind the “Restore Campus Free Speech Act.” Then, a history of Free Speech Movement, and why leftist activism relies on lies.
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The majority of college students now oppose free speech, according to recent polls, which is a very hilarious and subtle irony that these students are giving their opinion.
They're telling someone their opinion that they oppose free speech.
That is neither here nor there.
Left-wing commentators want to gaslight us all on this and insist that the campus free speech crisis is nothing more than a myth.
We will analyze the facts and discuss what can be done about it with North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Dan Forrest, a driving force behind the Restore Campus Free Speech Act.
Then, a history of the free speech movement and why leftist activism relies on lies.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
So much to talk about today.
While we still have the ability to use our voices and to speak and to give our opinions, there is a lot to talk about because there are a ton of misconceptions out there and lefties at Fox and the Washington Post are simply lying to the American people on the question of the free speech crisis on campus.
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Okay.
Leftists are denying that there is a crisis of free speech on campus.
I don't know if you've seen the think pieces over the last few years.
Matthew Iglesias over at Vox.com, he's actually arguing that support for free speech is rising right now on campuses.
How he does that is a great question.
Jeffrey Sachs at the Washington Post says that the crisis is absolutely a myth.
It's just a scaremongering by fragile little conservatives.
Fragile little conservatives who are being beaten with bats on college campuses and disinvited from speaking there.
And Andrew Hartman at the Washington Post says that students have never been hostile to speech.
Oh, old people always say that students are hostile to speech.
That has never been the case.
They claim that opinion surveys show this.
They say, oh well, you know, this survey says that students really support free speech.
And in a certain sense, they're right.
There have been public opinion surveys that show that students say, oh no, we shouldn't censor this speech, we shouldn't censor this speech.
The trouble is that when the students actually get to campus and when the rubber hits the road, you know, when they actually have to put their ideas into practice, They completely balk.
They disinvite speakers.
They shriek.
They yell.
They shout people down.
And in some cases, like Charles Murray, during one of his campus visits, they assaulted the speakers.
Other people, by the way, have shown that all of these claims from the lefty journalists just are not true.
And that isn't just conservatives who say that.
This is people from across the political spectrum.
Social scientists Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt have shown this.
There was this giant survey that I think a lot of the lefty journalists are relying on.
But when you focus the research down onto the kids who are actually in college now, not the 35 year olds, not the people who are out of college, not even the millennials, when you focus it on the iGen, the generation that comes right after millennials, people who entered college in 2015 and onward, There is a downturn in support for controversial speakers.
These are not millennials.
We love to knock millennials.
There are plenty of reasons to knock them.
But the people who are actually shouting down conservative speakers right now and guzzling laundry detergent in the form of those delicious Tide Pods, those are actually the next generation.
That's iGen.
Another writer, Robbie Soev from Reason, writes how lefties who are using the General Social Survey, the GSS, that's what Iglesias and all of those guys at WAPA were citing, they're not including the people who are there now.
So sure, it uses older generations, it uses millennials, but actually some of those statistics actually exclude the students who are in college.
They exclude those, for instance, who live in group quarters.
And I don't know if you've ever been to college, but group quarters is a fancy way of saying dormitories.
That's where people live in college, and if it's excluding them, then not only is it giving you a lot of information that you don't need, it's excluding the only information you're asking for, which is what do college students right now think of free speech?
Now, it's true.
Even on this survey, there are increases in the tolerance for things like speech regarding homosexuality or speech regarding communism.
Certainly, decades ago, this would have been unheard of to be so open and tolerant of those two things.
But, obviously, opinion has utterly shifted in America on those particular issues since the fall of the Soviet Union and since the gay rights movement.
Think about racism, however.
According to this survey, in 1976, 73% of people thought that alleged racists should not be censored.
That number has dropped to 56% by 2015.
Mind you, this isn't saying we endorse racist speakers or we hold racist views.
It's simply saying people who hold views that some might consider racist should not be censored.
And that level is dropping precipitously.
And, of course, it's always a...
Tough question to say, well, what is racism?
These days, the left accuses anybody who wants to lower taxes of being a racist.
Ann Coulter, one time when I was in college, gave me excellent advice, which is that when a left calls you a racist, you know that you've won the argument, because they just resort to these attacks, these vague attacks that just hit your character.
And in America, there's no worse thing to be called.
There is nothing worse than being called a racist in America.
They know that, so they bandied the term about, and now...
Only 56% of people believe that alleged racists should not be censored.
In 1976, a quarter of people thought that racist books should be banned from libraries.
So about 25% of Americans.
That number has increased to 39%.
By 2015, that books that are deemed racist...
Now, who knows what's a racist book?
There's that book always cited The Bell Curve, which in one line says there might be racial differences in IQ, and this has no bearing on public policy.
The one line...
Few people have even read the book.
Most people have just read summaries of it.
Would that book be banned?
What else would it be banned?
Would other polemical books from conservatives...
Social scientific books that disagree with leftist orthodoxy, would those all be banned?
From 1976 to 2015, there has been a 60% increase in Americans who think that racist books or allegedly racist books should be banned from libraries.
That is a terrifying increase.
According to a YouGov survey, 58% of students don't want to be exposed to intolerant and offensive ideas on campus.
The majority of students who go to college do not want to be exposed to offensive ideas.
The entire purpose of college is to be exposed to offensive ideas.
That is why you go.
You want to be exposed to ideas that you've never heard of before that might offend your prejudices or the things that are familiar to you, and then you get to figure out what you actually think.
Now, the majority, a strong majority of students don't want that.
That same YouGov survey shows that 48% of students believe that the First Amendment should not protect hate speech.
And you know, that's all we do on this program is we just spew hate facts.
We cite hate statistics.
We read hate philosophy and theology and hate history, you know.
Almost half of students think that the First Amendment, which explicitly protects unpopular speech, should not protect unpopular speech.
A terrifying change.
A Cato Institute study found that over half of college students, 51%, think that disrespectful people should be stripped of their free speech rights.
Which, looking around these colleges, I don't think anyone would be able to speak anymore.
All of the students would be rendered mute, which would be perfectly fine.
There's a lot more to talk about with this.
Some more evidence to smack around Matt Iglesias and all those lefties at Vox and the Washington Post where democracy dies in darkness.
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Alright, back to the unsafe spaces at colleges.
Katie Herzog, writing at The Stranger, points out that there is a survey from the Knight Foundation and Gallup that shows that two-thirds of students believe the Constitution should not protect hate speech.
So that's a survey from Gallup.
Two-thirds of students no longer believe in the First Amendment.
They want to gut it.
They want to repeal it.
They think that it should not protect hate speech, which really just means speech that I don't agree with.
That's the actual definition of it.
John Villaseñor at Brookings, I'm sure I'm butchering that name, sounds very nice and exotic, Villaseñor, but there's no squiggly on the name.
But in any case, from Brookings Institution, they conducted a survey showing that one-fifth of undergrads say that it is okay to use physical force To silence speakers who make offensive and hurtful statements.
One in five undergrads are Antifa thugs, in their own thought at least.
They think it's perfectly fine to punch somebody in the face if they say something that you disagree with.
Fifty percent of students think that it's okay to silence speakers by shouting over them.
The hecklers veto.
I've seen this at campus talks all over the place.
They'll start yelling at you.
They don't want to.
They don't want you to say what you want to say because they're afraid of these thoughts.
They don't believe that there is an objective truth and that we're just debating over what the nature of that is.
They believe that we're just competing in a senseless world and I'm going to yell louder than you and that's how I'm going to win.
Those are the broad statistics.
As far as particular campuses go, take a look at Clemson, as Stanley Kurtz outlines at National Review.
In 2006, when the redefinition of marriage was being debated, gay marriage was being debated, Clemson conservatives wanted to hold a rally to defend traditional marriage.
They were told that they couldn't do that by the administration because the auditorium was outside of the free speech zones.
The auditorium on the college campus was not a free speech zone, so they were not allowed to do that.
In 2010, faculty were told that they needed administration approval before they could speak with their own public officials.
They had to get administration approval to talk to their own politicians and elected officials.
In 2012, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education fought with Clemson, again, over these speech code policies, speech zones where people were allowed to say what they thought on a college campus and ask questions.
In 2014, a faculty member called for publicly shaming every single student who attended an allegedly racist party.
Now, I say allegedly racist because the party was a gangster-themed party.
You know, there are all these different parties on campus.
There are some pretty funny ones.
Usually the whole...
The point of these parties is to get girls to dress up in skimpy outfits.
So, you know, they'll have it like tennis bros and sorority.
And then there will be words that I probably shouldn't say on the program.
But, you know, they always kind of rhyme or something.
There was one called...
Dinosaurs and prostitutes or something was one of the parties.
So anyway, that's the idea for these things.
And what's so awful about this, though, is that the lefties here, who are accusing people of racism and trying to shame students, they are conflating gangsters and black people.
They are the ones doing it.
It isn't the people who are saying, we're going to have a party of gangsters, and they say, oh, you must mean black people.
When did I say that?
You're the one who's saying black people are gangsters.
The lefties who say that Republicans use dog whistles.
So, you Republicans, you're using secret dog whistles to aggress against black people or ethnic minorities.
And one of the examples they cite is law and order.
They say if you support law and order, that's a dog whistle against black people.
If you talk about getting tough on criminals, that's a dog whistle against black people.
You say...
I don't think black people are criminals.
I don't think those are synonymous at all.
You think that.
That's deeply offensive that you think that.
Perhaps you should go into a room and think about what you've done and analyze the basis of your own thoughts.
That's not nice, you know.
In 2015, back to Clemson.
That was a side note on usage.
In 2015, campus activists under the group See the Stripes, you know, See the Confederate Stripes.
They basically say that America is an awful racist place.
This campus activist group Demanded that attendees of that party, that aforementioned gangster party, be criminally prosecuted.
You go to some stupid party so you can see girls in skimpy clothing, then you have to be criminally prosecuted.
That was their suggestion.
Later that month, 110 professors signed a full page ad in the Clemson student newspaper endorsing demands for prosecution.
Look, students are always idiots.
That's almost the definition of being a student.
110 of their professors, whom Roger Kimball calls them tenured radicals, those people signed the petition saying, yes, we should prosecute people for trying to see girls in skimpy clothing at a party and being allegedly racist.
There were three faculty members who defended the First Amendment.
110 opposed it.
Three supported it.
In 2016, bananas were found near a banner honoring black history on campus.
Activists called for criminal prosecution.
They found a banana.
They said, this is an aggression against black people.
It was later discovered that the bananas were not racially motivated at all.
Occasionally, you just need to throw away a banana peel or something.
This was known, by the way, by the administration, that it was not racially motivated, even as they kept silent.
In 2016, a Clemson RA, a resident advisor, tried to ban displays of Harambe the gorilla, the gorilla who was shot at the zoo and became an internet meme.
Again, I would like to point out, it is not the conservatives here who are saying that black people are like gorillas.
It's the lefties who are saying this horribly offensive thing.
So they're the ones who put it up and you say, hey guys, you know, that comparison didn't even occur to us.
Who's the one who's thinking of the world in racial and derogatory and defamatory terms?
It would be the left.
You could go on and on.
There's not even enough time to go over all of the examples at Clemson.
Then, of course, there's dear old Yale.
We've all seen Shrieking Girl, you know, the girl, this is not an intellectual space, wah, wah, wah.
A lot of people haven't seen what was said by the professor just before that little girl screamed in the couple hours of debating before that.
Here is a former Yale professor Christakis.
Even when it's offensive, especially when it's offensive.
Even when it denigrates me.
Even when it denigrates you, even though I don't agree with the content of the speech.
I have the same objections to the speech that you do.
The same ones.
But I defend the right of people to speak their mind.
So who gets to decide what's offensive?
Who gets to decide, guys?
What if everybody says, I am hurt?
Does that mean everyone else has to stop speaking?
But that's not what was happening.
So I agree with the content of your speech.
Shrieking girl standing right there, by the way, as you'll see in a second.
That is liberal Democrat professor Nicholas Christakis explaining what free speech means.
It doesn't mean I agree with the content of your speech.
It means I agree with your right to say what you would like to say, and then, like civilized people, we'll debate these things, and ideally my ideas will win because they're more correct.
These students, like, they've never heard of this before.
Like, this were a totally foreign concept to them, because it is a foreign concept to them.
How was that totally reasonable explanation met?
Here is Shrieking Girl.
Job, to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Sylman.
You have not done that.
By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master.
Do you understand that?
No, I don't agree with that.
Then why the f*** did you accept the position?
Who the f*** hired you?
I have a different...
You should step down!
If that is what you think about being a master, you should step down!
It is not about creating an intellectual state!
It is not!
Do you understand that?
It's about creating a home here!
You are not doing that!
You're supposed to be our advocate!
Now, as you all know, this show also is not about creating an intellectual space most of the time, but today we have a wonderful guest to talk about the free speech crisis on campus, and so I guess we'll create an intellectual space for just a little bit, and then we'll go back to just babbling and incoherence.
Here to join us to tell us what to do about this crisis is North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Dan Forrest, who is the driving force behind the Restore Campus Free Speech Act.
Your Honor, thank you for being here.
I'm not a judge, Michael, but thank you very much.
It's great to be with you.
Thanks for having me on.
I certainly enjoyed the lead-in.
I think it was pretty apropos.
And we don't always have the time to set these things up like you just did.
So we can jump right in.
Well, thank you very much.
And I must tell you, I'll apologize for the greeting.
It's very difficult to figure out the title for Lieutenant Governor.
I obviously would prefer to call you Governor already.
I'd even be happy to call you President because of all of your excellent leadership on this issue.
Just quickly, you know, I think we've knocked down all of this ridiculous argument that there isn't a crisis.
You have been a leader on this issue.
What does this bill do?
What does this law do, rather?
Well, I mean, you know, let's take a step back, right?
I mean, I think what we have to do is, a lot of times, is get to the heart of these matters.
I think you set it up appropriately.
The professor in that last clip you were playing there set it up appropriately, too, you know.
The real question is who gets to decide these things?
That's what needs to be emblessed in the minds of these students who are saying let's control all this speech, let's create all these safe spaces against us haters and bigots and phobes of all different kinds.
Who gets to decide what is appropriate speech and what is not?
To the left, it's the left that gets to decide what is appropriate speech.
And so we've seen all over the country, as you mentioned earlier, the heckler's veto.
It has become the new way to tell people what they can and can't say on college campuses.
So we've had students all over the country and faculty members and so forth, the faculty or the administration themselves, that invite speakers to come to a campus and speak.
about whatever the topic may be, and then you have the heckler's veto shut them down.
And you and I would both agree that the shutting down of free speech does not equal free speech.
And that's what we've really seen all over the country, is these people think they're operating under their First Amendment rights when they do this, but this is really not what the First Amendment was created to do.
So we want to protect the First Amendment, we want to protect free speech, and I'm not a big fan of just creating policy for the sake of creating policy.
But what we've seen is that our colleges and universities across the country, and even here in North Carolina, have run amok on this.
And I personally believe that we don't need safe spaces on college campuses.
I believe America is a free speech zone.
It should be a safe space.
And we need to make sure that all of our campuses abide by the same kind of laws that we do You know, everywhere else in America.
So we saw this happening.
We said we need to nip this in the bud in North Carolina.
We need to make sure that what happened at Berkeley and other places doesn't happen here.
So we started to craft policy along with Stanley Kurtz, Goldwater Institute, and others that did just that.
And the way that we went about that was just trying to be very reasonable and really try to assign this policy to protect the First Amendment for all students on the campus.
And so we put together what we believe is a kind of a uniform standard policy that we would like to see rolled out across the country.
But you mentioned FIRE earlier as well, and I'll hit on them.
FIRE is this nonpartisan foundation that ranks universities and colleges across the country.
On their access to free speech.
So they have, as you know, a green light, yellow light, red light rating system.
And if you're green, you're good for free speech.
And if you're yellow, you're not as good.
And if you're red, that's just bad.
Well, when we started this process, we had, of our 17 public institutions, higher education institutions, we had one green light university in North Carolina.
That was the University of Chapel Hill.
We started talking about that.
Just talking about this, the policy had not been enacted yet.
Prior to the policy being enacted, just because we were bringing it to people's attention and letting them know we were paying attention, we moved from one to six institutions pretty much overnight.
I'll give the campuses credit for this as they stepped up and said, we want to be a green light institution.
So we saw just the fact that the political environment was paying attention, we saw the universities pay attention as well.
So I'll just hit the highlights and you can ask questions, but the highlights of the policy are real simple.
It just said you can't shut down somebody's free speech.
If they're invited to the campus, there has to be a time, place, and manner for them to be able to speak freely without the heckler's veto.
There still has to be a time, place, and manner for demonstrations to take place, or even spontaneous demonstrations, but you can't.
Shut down somebody else's free speech and call it free speech, and if you do that again and again and again, then there are repercussions for doing that.
With due process, due process should always take place, but we put our board of governors who oversees our university system in charge of this, and we said, you know what, we're not going to shut down professors' free speech, we're not going to tell them what to say, we're not going to control the environment on the university in any way other than to say, The university campus is a free speech zone.
And so we really opened up our universities to make sure we protected our students, make sure that our university system and the individual campuses didn't get involved, didn't involve their students in the process of policy at the General Assembly telling them Requiring them of how they needed to act in regard to those kind of policies being created.
And the point of that heckler's veto, that's such an important point to drive home that there are repercussions for this, that it is not free speech.
Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, he said, there's a thought that stops thought, and that's the only thought that ought to be stopped.
There is speech that stops speech, and you can't have that.
There's no moral equivalence there.
It's wonderful to hear that the campuses actually stepped up, or at least a lot of the campuses did, and said, no, we want to protect free speech.
We didn't realize we weren't doing this, and we want to do it now.
And yet, when this passed the legislature in North Carolina, you got 10 yes votes from Democrats.
The Senate, however, passed it along strict party lines, and your governor, Democrat Roy Cooper, allowed it to pass into law without vetoing it, that's very good, but also without signing it.
What does that say about the momentum for these kind of laws, about the appetite?
Why are Democrats still keeping this at arm's length when even many colleges want to embrace it and want to live up to the highest ideals of the university?
Well, I think because the left has co-opted the Democrat Party, there's just, you know, that's just the way it is, and they have to appease their base.
And so the reason the Senate voted for it unanimously in North Carolina is because all the Democrats walked out of the room.
So it was just Republicans actually voting on it.
The Democrats decided to get up and leave.
They didn't do that in the House.
So they played political football with this one.
And the governor, again, just kind of ignored it and said, oh, well, I want to play it both ways.
I'm not going to sign it.
And, you know, they all just kind of pander and say there's a lot of things we don't like about it, but there's some things we do like about it.
Listen, we worked very closely with the university system.
We wanted the universities and the chancellors to be partners in this.
We believe it protects the chancellors.
We believe it protects the universities.
Why would you pick a side and run headlong with a certain side that could get you in trouble as a university by going out against the First Amendment?
So we think that protects chancellors.
It keeps chancellors from having to stand up in front of their mob on the university and say we're picking a side on this because you mob want us to pick a side.
The chancellors can say we don't get engaged in these things.
We don't get engaged in this.
Our campus is a free speech zone and we're going to protect free speech and we're not going to We spend a whole lot of time worrying about safe spaces and trigger warnings and all these kind of things that we're seeing pop up all over America.
You and I get offended every single day.
We don't crawl into our hole and start crying about our offense.
We want to go do something about it.
If we're offended, we want to teach people.
We want to educate people.
The reason students act this way about the First Amendment is because we allowed a whole group of students to pass through 13 grades of school to go on to college without ever learning A single thing about our Constitution.
Why our Constitution exists.
Why the principles of that Constitution were founded upon our Declaration of Independence.
Why did that matter?
What were the grievances that our Founding Fathers had against the King that all came from the foundation of Western civilization and a great history that came before that?
We don't teach these things anymore, and so because we don't teach these foundations, we have a whole generation of people now that have no basis for the understanding of these things that they're out espousing and protesting against and anything else.
They are the most highly credentialed and least educated generation one could imagine.
And you make the excellent point on the chancellors and on the university presidents, which is that the universities that have caved or been unclear about how they're going to deal with free speech issues, they have totally imploded I remember when Yale was sort of ground zero for this, I wrote a letter to the president of Yale and I said, you think that you're protecting yourself by playing nicely with these kids and trying to accommodate them.
This will not work out for you.
They will not rest here.
Their goal is not to preserve the ideals of the university.
It's to hollow out the university.
Whereas, places like Purdue University, where former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels is president, he made it very clear.
He said, we support free speech.
This is not a negotiation.
I'm just telling you how it is.
Everything calmed down.
The University of Chicago, same thing.
Other states now are following your lead.
What do you think the future is for this type of laws around the country?
Is this going to be a movement across the country, or is there a limit to how far these will reach?
Well, we'll have to wait and see.
I think in North Carolina right now, I may be corrected, but I think we have 10 of our universities out of our 16 large public universities that are green lights now.
There were only 32 of them in the country, so we had a third of them right here in North Carolina.
So far, it's working here.
And we haven't had any big incidences yet.
But when that incident happens, the response of the university is going to be really important.
The response of our Board of Governors is going to be really important.
The response of the General Assembly is going to be really important.
That's what's really going to be the proof in the pudding of this.
Not that you create a policy, right?
You can set the speed limit, but if everybody disobeys the speed limit, it doesn't matter if you have signs all over the interstate.
So right now, we place the signs up.
You know, if we place the guardrails out there, We'll see how everybody stays between the lines when push comes to shove, but I think it's good model legislation for the whole country.
I think we've proved that at least the universities, we have, again, 10 of them working towards 16, but we have 10 of them that want to play this game the right way, just like Mitch Daniels does at Purdue.
And so I think if we can keep moving along those tracks, we're going to start to educate the students as well.
One of the provisions in this bill was to I have freshman orientation classes on free speech to be able to actually tell these students what free speech means and what the campus free speech policy is.
That's a really good first step and we'll see how it plays out over time.
It's so important because someone asked me a question at a talk.
They said, how should we treat the left?
How should we interact with them when they don't know so much about our civic history and our constitution and our founding documents?
I say, you know, in some ways you should treat them like children.
And you don't want to smack a child around.
That's no good.
You know, no good parent does that.
You just want to put information out there and hopefully instruct somebody.
And now where there are so many mandatory trainings and classes and this and that, the idea that perhaps you should learn a thing or two about free speech and free expression as an American ideal is just a wonderful way to get in there and lay the foundation for hopefully a generation that can be both educated and credentialed And preserve American liberty, which is only one generation away from extinction at any given time.
Lieutenant Governor Dan Forrest, I've taken up a lot of your time, and you have to go get back to work because you were doing excellent work on this issue and others.
So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Michael.
I enjoyed it.
We'll look forward to the next time.
Alright, and we're going to go into a little bit of the history of the free speech movement, because that is the name of this movement.
It's been around for about 50 or 60 years, and it is the most absurdly named movement probably in American history.
But we can't get into that just yet, can we?
It's so terrible, because there's some really good stuff coming up.
But, if you were on Facebook or YouTube...
Well, we've probably been censored everywhere by now, haven't we?
I mean, with all of the Zuckerberg stuff in the news and YouTube has demonetized just about everything I've ever done, they probably demonetized my old acting reels on YouTube.
So, if you're anywhere, maybe you're listening to this through a tin can and a string or something somewhere, you have to go to dailywire.com right now.
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That is a wonderful thing to do.
Uh, If you don't do that already, come on and do it.
It is only $10 a month or $100 for an annual membership.
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You get the Andrew Klavan Show.
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Many are called, but few are chosen.
So go over there right now, and again, none of that matters.
What you really need is this, because right now the free speech zone on college campuses is about the size of a sheet of paper, and so you can't even fit both feet into it.
But because of guys like the Goldwater Institute and Lieutenant Governor Dan Forrest...
Similar laws across the country.
Pretty soon we're going to have a whole big university-wide free speech zone.
And then the leftist tears, they are going to water the plants for generations and generations to come into the new age.
So make sure you go get your leftist tears tumbler.
Dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
We're running late as always, but I'm going to fly through this because it's so important to know where all of this craziness comes from.
It didn't just spring out of nowhere.
The anti-free speech movement didn't just spring out of the air or out of the ether or something.
It actually sprang up out of the free speech movement from the 1960s, which really was the anti-free speech movement.
It's not like this just changed magically and it totally reverted and the parties switched names or whatever nonsense they say.
This is part of a long-standing left-wing movement.
As with so many left-wing movements, the free speech movement is a total misnomer.
You see this with Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter says that Black Lives Matter, but they don't care about protecting Black Lives.
I've always thought Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter matters, but Black Lives don't matter to Black Lives Matter.
The March for Our Lives is a similar one.
They don't really care about marching for our lives.
Planned Parenthood sends out tweets to support them.
Planned Parenthood kills a million babies a year.
The Women's March, it was the march for all women except for the women who are Republicans.
Except for half of the women.
Those women weren't allowed to participate.
Those women were shunned from the movement.
The free speech movement was founded in the 1964-1965 school year at UC Berkeley under the leadership of someone named Mario Savio.
And Berkeley now, by the way, totally embraces the name of the Free Speech Movement.
They have renamed the steps in front of the hall where 700 students were arrested during the original Free Speech Movement.
They've renamed them the Mario Savio steps.
They have a dining hall now named the Free Speech Movement Cafe.
As you go down, they're really, you know, very bourgeois now.
They're taking all the radicals and making it very bourgeois.
Freshmen now have to read a biography of the Free Speech Movement leader, Savio.
Ironically, every undergrad must now also take a course on theoretical or analytical issues relevant to understanding race, culture, and ethnicity in American society.
That is to say, they have to take a course in rigid ideological conformity.
The free speech movement begets this.
Well, how does the free speech movement beget mandatory ideological conformity?
How did it happen?
It's because it was a lie the whole time.
This was largely aimed at expanding political activity on campuses.
So in the early 1960s, political activity and fundraising on college campuses It was basically limited to the GOP and the Democrat clubs, the college Republicans, the college Democrats.
Those were the only people who could do it.
The free speech movement, which were basically useful idiots for communists, for the Soviet Union, for people who didn't like America very much, they viewed America as an evil imperialistic empire.
They largely supported the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
They opposed the Cold War liberal consensus.
They wanted to clear political barriers for using campuses as a base for radical political activity.
They largely supported the Cuban Revolution.
There was a ton of radical leftist student activism at the time.
The Students for a Democratic Society, which gave way to a terrorist group called the Weather Underground, one of whose leaders, by the way, ended up mentoring Barack Obama.
That's a separate story.
Savio knew this.
The head of the free speech movement knew this too.
Years after the movement in the 1980s, he said that nothing but good had come from FSM. Nothing but good had come from it.
Sol Stern outlines this very well at a city journal.
This has largely been the case.
Our enemies in the 20th century, and especially in the 1960s, backed a lot of radical anti-American organizations to weaken the resolve of the United States and to sow division in the United States.
We know this happened.
They have admitted it.
This was clear to many people at the time and to many more people now.
Fortunately, there are organizations and there are politicians that are fighting back.
You know, everyone now is so upset that Russia took out some Facebook ads.
They took out a handful of Facebook ads in 2016 that wouldn't move the needle at all.
They were doing far, far worse than the alleged Russia collusion in the 1960s.
And the very people now who are so shocked by Russian collusion were the ones participating in it in the 1960s.
There are organizations.
There are politicians fighting back.
Dan Forrest is a good example.
We should not be gaslit by this.
This is obviously happening.
We need to fight back every step of the way.
Don't believe it for a second.
When the Washington Post, where democracy dies in darkness, tells you this is a myth, where Matthew Iglesias says, oh, don't look there.
No, no, nothing to see here.
Move along, folks.
Move along.
You know it's happening.
And I use this as a good time to plug the Bill Buckley program at Yale.
I was, I think, the first fellow for them in the first year of student fellows.
And the Buckley program at Yale is one of these groups, one of the few groups that's bringing intellectual diversity to campus.
They're having their fourth annual disinvitation dinner coming up on April 18th.
They do this dinner every year where they take one of the people who has been disinvited from speaking at a campus because the lefties shout them down or threaten to kill them or something.
They take one of those speakers and they invite them to give a talk I'm going to try to make it if I can.
I'm not sure if I'll be back east by then, but I'm certainly going to try to.
And that is another way to fight back and also, of course, To support the efforts and the legislative efforts of guys like Dan Forrest.
They are doing God's work.
It is really a beautiful thing.
A good, a nice up note to end on.
We will be back tomorrow.
We've got more exciting things coming for you, but I won't tell.
You should be surprised.
And get your mailbag questions in because that will be on Thursday.
I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I'll see you tomorrow.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
