July 27, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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(upbeat music) | |
| I'm on a one day break from touring with Jordan Peterson and joining me in studio today is a free speech lawyer | ||
| and the director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, | ||
| Ari Cohen, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| That was a wordy intro right there. | ||
| A lot of freedom stuff in there, and that's all the stuff that I like, so I'm looking forward to this. | ||
| So you guys, FIRE, as an organization, is one of the few bastions of sanity these days. | ||
| Like, when I see what you guys are tweeting about and consistently defending the principles of free speech and free expression and open inquiry, I'm always like, ah. | ||
| There are some good guys left. | ||
| So first, can you just tell me a little bit about the organization, why you guys got started, how you personally got involved? | ||
| Well, we got started in 1999 with a professor at Penn and a civil liberties lawyer in Philadelphia, where they both decided that there was a problem. | ||
| There was an epidemic at our colleges and universities of the core individual rights that make up our constitution, if you will, as individuals, as people, | ||
| as citizens of the United States, weren't being respected on campuses across the country. | ||
| Back in '99, they were seeing this. '99. | ||
| Yeah, that's interesting because a lot of people say this is just a totally recent phenomenon. | ||
| Well, I think, you know, a lot of it, there was the political correctness movement of the '80s | ||
| and '90s a little bit, you know, that might have had something to do with it. | ||
| But this has been a problem since the free speech movement back at Berkeley, you know, long before even the 80s or 90s, you know, censorship is an age old problem. | ||
| It predates the United States of America, really. | ||
| And as Alan and Harvey went about creating fire, and they decided to locate it in Philadelphia, | ||
| which is the birthplace of our nation, they really got an outpouring of people saying, | ||
| "Hey, this happened to me too." | ||
| And they said, "Well, this is a problem." | ||
| This is an epidemic. | ||
| We need to fix it. | ||
| And fire was born, or lit, if you will. | ||
| And over the years, getting close to 20 now, crazy enough, that has actually just gone up every year. | ||
| More and more people reach out to fire for help. | ||
| When I got to fire for the second time, I actually was a legal fellow of fire after I graduated from law school, before I started in private practice. | ||
| But when I came back in 2013, I'm getting several hundred case submissions a year. | ||
| And now we are getting Damn near close to a thousand a year. | ||
| Wow. | ||
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Incredible. | |
| And that's just the stuff that we hear about. | ||
| We can only imagine how much other stuff is going on around the country for people who don't know that we're out there to help them, or people who perhaps go about it themselves. | ||
| It's crazy to think about how much is going on. | ||
| Yeah, so I wanna talk about some of those cases and some of the specific work that you're doing, but Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, I am a believer right now, partly because of Kanye West and because of a lot of people online right now, that the individual is making a comeback, that the idea of the individual versus the collective is actually making a comeback. | ||
| Do you have any idea when they came up with the name for FIRE, why it was so important to put the individual front and center? | ||
| I think it's, and I'm speaking out of some level of ignorance because I haven't actually discussed this with either of them personally, but if I had to guess it's because the individual qualities, the freedom of conscience, the freedom of speech, the things that allow us to participate in society We don't get to the collective unless we have the individuals. | ||
| One is necessary to have the other. | ||
| Because what is a collective other than a group of individuals? | ||
| Consensus is a bunch of individual opinions that throughout the process of winnowing and debating different good ideas and bad ideas we reach a common understanding. | ||
| We reach a a norm for society. | ||
| And that's why free speech particularly is so important is because that's how we get to the optimal resolution, | ||
| the optimal conclusions. | ||
| That's how we reach these communal positions is only through our own personal expressions | ||
| of what we believe, which exposes us to criticism or agreement or just flat out discussion with other people. | ||
| So how do you think the ideas of the collective took root so much at college campus then? | ||
| Well, I think there's the give and take in society at large that we really go through every once in a while | ||
| in terms of... | ||
| Thinking about things as individualistic and then worrying about broader concerns of the community. | ||
| And that's not altogether a bad thing. | ||
| And I think the college campus, and it's always been this way, it's a microcosm of what we're experiencing in the broader society. | ||
| And I think that's another reason why it's so important to protect individual rights on college campuses, because where they fall on college campuses, they're almost certainly sure to fall in society writ large. | ||
| Yeah, so that actually, we discussed this briefly right before the cameras turned on, that's my concern about this. | ||
| When people say, oh, you know, there isn't a free speech issue on college campuses, and even though I keep going to college campuses and it's very clear to me that there is a free speech problem there, but it's not what's going to happen. | ||
| It's not just these screaming kids right now. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| It's that these are the people that are going to be in leadership positions 5, 10, 15 years in the future and further than that, obviously. | ||
| And if those ideas take root because they were able to silence us, Once they're the lawmakers, once they're in charge of public policy, they're not going to be too kind to the people who they were silencing way back when, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's really one of the key problems. | ||
| And it's not even just if they get elected to power, even if they aren't elected and they don't rise to power and they can't impose these views on other people. | ||
| These are future citizens, even if they're not necessarily future leaders. | ||
| And the discourse of the nation, if that is the prevalent feeling in society, is going to suffer tremendously as a result if Even if they're not in Congress or in the state legislatures. | ||
| If 50% of the country's population thinks that we shouldn't be talking about certain things, we're not going to talk about these things. | ||
| And it's going to be societally imposed, if nothing else. | ||
| And I think that's incredibly damaging to just about every aspect of our life as a country. | ||
| Yeah, it's so interesting to me, because I know you read about this, but I was at the University of New Hampshire a couple weeks ago, and first we were supposed to give a speech on campus, then about two hours before they announced that they couldn't secure the room, that they felt there were too many threats, so there were about 200 or 250 people supposed to be in the room, they moved us to the hockey rink. | ||
| which seats 7,500 people. | ||
| So I stood in front of a little backdrop and I talked to about 200 people. | ||
| It was about 150 people that were there to listen and be respectful and all that stuff. | ||
| And then there were probably about 50 protesters, roughly. | ||
| Those are the rough numbers. | ||
| But the desire just to shout down, to use noisemakers, to scream, to chant like robots. | ||
| They love robotic chants, all of these things. | ||
| And I kept saying to them, guys, do you have any direct questions? | ||
| Is there something that I've said that you disagree with? | ||
| Or is there something you'd directly like to ask me? | ||
| And time and time again, the answer was no. | ||
| And I don't know how you break them out of that, other than keep having these conversations and hope that the refugees make it to us. | ||
| That's a common problem. | ||
| I think it really comes down to ideological purity that people are after. | ||
| The idea that if I disagree with you on something, whether small or even fundamental, if I disagree with you on that one thing, that means nothing that you have to say could possibly be of value to me. | ||
| And that is completely false. | ||
| You couldn't be farther from the truth. | ||
| We can learn so much from the people we disagree with the most. | ||
| Even if I disagreed with you on absolutely everything, it would still be incredibly valuable for me to talk to you. | ||
| If only because that helps me sharpen and really understand why I believe what I believe in. | ||
| And people really discount the importance of understanding why you believe something. | ||
| Yeah, so the argument that I've been making for a while is that, and I do think right now, at least in 2018, this is more of a problem on the left, that they've owned the ideas and the narrative and the college campus discussion and academia and media and all that. | ||
| They've owned that for so long that the reason these students end up being so hysterical is because they never hear counter ideas. | ||
| So then you get a pretty moderate guy who's arguing about liberty and freedom for everybody and live and let live, and that actually offends them because they never hear anything outside of what they're being taught. | ||
| That goes to the academic part, I think, mostly. | ||
| Well, I think we're doing a really crappy job of educating students before they get to college about why free speech and our other rights are important. | ||
| Civics education is clearly in the toilet right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's bizarre to me. | ||
| I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, one of the sites, one of the most famous free speech cases, you know, in recent history. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can you lay it out for those that don't know the story? | ||
| In the 70s, the American Socialist Party, the Nationalist Party, the Illinois Nazis, if you'd ask the Blues Brothers, wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, which outside of New York had the largest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the United States. | ||
| And Skokie tried to stop them. | ||
| And they sued with the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. | ||
| And it went to both the Supreme Court of Illinois and the Supreme Court of the United States. | ||
| And the Nazis had the right to march, and the courts held so, and there were threats of violence and disruption and all, you know, people outcrying as to how this could be allowed, but ultimately the Nazis had the First Amendment right to march through Skokie, and I grew up learning about that case from a very young age. | ||
| I can't tell you how many times I saw the movie they made about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It really, it got me thinking at a young age about why this is important, how I think about it. | ||
| And I can't tell you that as a young child, I completely agree that the Nazis should have a right to march. | ||
| When I was that young, part of me didn't grasp the overarching fundamental importance of free speech. | ||
| But I was thinking about it at least, and I got there. | ||
| And I get the feeling that sometimes we're not doing enough to make our students think about why it's important. | ||
| Yeah, it's such an important case, and I'm glad you mentioned it, because it goes really to the heart of this, that the people that lived in Skokie, as you said, the second largest amount of Holocaust survivors in the country, these people literally survived the genocide. | ||
| Probably virtually all of them lost, some of them probably lost all of their family members and friends and all of that. | ||
| And yet I would sit here as someone that lost Holocaust survivors on both sides of my family and tell you it was the right decision. | ||
| You can't let the Nazis or the white supremacists or whatever they are, you can't let them start ransacking property, you can't let them start killing people or harming people, but letting them march, that's the exchange of free speech, and it's kinda shitty, but you gotta defend it when it's hard to defend. | ||
| You have to defend it when it's hard to defend because otherwise it's not going to be around to defend when it's easy to defend. | ||
| Once you start creating exceptions and encroaching, there's no end to it. | ||
| We've seen, even in other countries, that once the encroachments start, It's always, well, we make that exception, and just this one other small exception, and then there's inevitably another one, and another one, and all for perhaps even, you know, good reasons in terms of, you know, ideals and the goals are laudable, perhaps. | ||
| I say it every show, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm getting tired of saying it. | ||
| You and me both. | ||
| But, you know, it's really, practically speaking, it's inevitable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much of this is just a confusion as to what the First Amendment is? | ||
| That's also what I've started to realize. | ||
| Because when I've gone on college campuses and the protesters are there, and I always say it, I welcome peaceful protest. | ||
| I completely welcome. | ||
| I welcome the exchange of ideas, the questions, all of that. | ||
| But when they're screaming about certain things, I think there's just a disconnect as to what, I think, two legal things. | ||
| I think what the First Amendment is and what hate speech is or isn't. | ||
| So can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Yeah, if I have to hear one more person, whether it be student, internet commenter, even journalists or faculty members sometimes say hate speech is not free speech, I'm gonna lose it. | ||
| Okay, so let's do that one first, because I really, I mean, this will be maybe what we promo for this episode, but I really want people to understand this. | ||
| Why is hate speech free speech? | ||
| Well, on a legal level, hate speech is free speech because the First Amendment and the courts have said nothing about hate speech being unprotected by the First Amendment. | ||
| Speech is protected by the First Amendment unless it falls under one of the very few existing categories of unprotected speech. | ||
| Yeah, what are those categories? | ||
| There's incitement to imminent lawless action. | ||
| These all have very high bars. | ||
| True threats and intimidation. | ||
| You can be sued for libel or slander, defamation as they're known. | ||
| Some states, I think, actually still have criminal statutes on the books, but they're rarely enforced. | ||
| Fraud, obscenity, which people often confuse with mere profanity or lewdness, but they are not the same thing by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| What's the difference on those two? | ||
| Well, profanity and lewdness are generally protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| Obscenity is a very high bar. | ||
| It's speech that has to be, or expression, I should say, more broadly than just speech, that has to appeal to the prurient interest, which is an inordinate fascination with sex, describe or depict sex in a patently offensive way. | ||
| And have no social, political, literary, or artistic value whatsoever. | ||
| To get down in the mud, have you ever heard of crush videos? | ||
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I feel like I have, but I'm honestly not sure what that is. | |
| They are videos of women wearing stilettos crushing small animals like hamsters and gerbils to death, and people apparently get off on that. | ||
| I don't pretend to understand it. | ||
| Even that is not wholly unprotected by the obscenity exception to the First Amendment. | ||
| That's a particularly interesting case, I suppose, because the idea of it, talking about it, seems like I would have no problem with that, but the action itself, probably there's some legal reasons, right? | ||
| Like killing animals, there's some law, I guess it's probably state law. | ||
| Right, but if you have this pornography, if you can call it that, I just have a hard time getting it. | ||
| If you have it and you possess it or distribute it, you can't be prosecuted for possessing that obscene material. | ||
| It's an interesting distinction that the act is the crime, or the act is what is illegal, not the depiction or the disseminating of the information or that sort of thing. | ||
| Child pornography, obviously not protected by the First Amendment. | ||
| There's the one additional wrinkle of the Fighting Words Doctrine, although there's considerable doubt that it remains a viable exception to the First Amendment, but it really gets brought up a lot in the hate speech debate. | ||
| To the extent it still exists, it's limited to face-to-face interactions where I say something to you that is so insanely abusive that you are likely to punch me in the face without thinking twice about it instead of taking a deep breath and either ignoring me or coming back at me. | ||
| And there's reasons why it's fallen into disuse, and it's worthwhile to note that the Supreme Court hasn't upheld a fighting words conviction since the case in the 40s when it created the fighting words exception. | ||
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Wow, that's interesting. | |
| Which is how far it's fallen into disuse. | ||
| It incentivizes punching people in the face. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It creates an easy way to censor the people that you disagree with. | ||
| And it would, I assume, be some level of a subjective piece of information as to what you think is offensive at | ||
| the highest order is different perhaps than what I think or exactly what some | ||
| of these other people yeah it creates terrible incentives and it would | ||
| basically lead to an institutionalized heckler's veto so it's really not | ||
| tenable yeah so on the on the hate speech front which it's clear what the | ||
| Supreme Court has said about hate speech | ||
| You're allowed to do it with these exceptions that you've just laid out. | ||
| You're allowed to say mean things. | ||
| What I'm realizing on college campuses is they really don't like that. | ||
| The set of people that we're talking about, they really don't like that. | ||
| It's just a fact. | ||
| You are allowed to say bad things. | ||
| You can say, I hate all the Jews. | ||
| You can say, I hate all the black people and all the gays or whatever. | ||
| You can say it. | ||
| You can't cause direct call to violence. | ||
| But what I think they think is that if you keep saying those things, I hate these people, that it's going to incite violence. | ||
| Now, my counter argument would be, no, you have to Use free speech to counter those bad ideas. | ||
| That's the whole purpose of free speech. | ||
| But do you see that, that that seems to be the slope that they consistently are on? | ||
| That if we allow you to say, I hate these people, which is bigoted and prejudiced and all of those things, but it's afforded to us by the Bill of Rights, they think that that's going to get you to violence. | ||
| How do you combat that notion, if you agree with the premise? | ||
| Well, you know, that is something that we tend to hear a lot in the First Amendment world. | ||
| And, you know, first of all, generally speaking in this country, we punish the people who do the bad acts. | ||
| If I watch your show and I get some kooky idea and go off and, you know, commit some crime, we're not going to throw you in jail because I'm an idiot and took a terrible idea that you didn't even intend me to take. | ||
| It might be different, though, if I was up here saying you should violently attack these people, etc. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| That's why the incitement standard is so high. | ||
| You have to be likely to incite, and intended to incite, immediate criminal action. | ||
| So if I tell you, hey, you know, it'd be fun to burn down a building, but you're not likely to do it, you're going to take it as a joke, I probably haven't committed any kind of unlawful expression. | ||
| "If I know you're a pyromaniac and I say, "Hey Dave, let's go burn down a building," | ||
| I might find myself in a very different situation. | ||
| I had sort of left that phase at about eight years old. | ||
| But you're all right. | ||
| But I think that if you take a look, one of my colleagues actually wrote a piece for Quillette | ||
| not so long ago about the Rwandan genocide and looking over the claims that the radio broadcasts | ||
| actually caused more violence. | ||
| And what it turns out is that the radio broadcasts, first of all, Only incited people who were already predisposed and who already felt that way. | ||
| It made it marginally easier for them to find people and be taught how to do certain things. | ||
| It was relatively ineffective, as it turns out, in convincing people who weren't already in a murderous rage to go out and commit violence. | ||
| And so, you know, I think that the fear that allowing these views to be aired is going to indisputably cause actual violence is somewhat overblown. | ||
| Now, there's a second part to it, which is that people expressing these views might lead to more people adopting those views and having prejudiced views. | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Right, so that's the part I was referencing. | ||
| But that's kind of the point, is that we put those views out there so we can fight them. | ||
| If we don't have them in public and we can't fight them, they're still gonna spread. | ||
| Nothing, no idea ever went away because we said, you can't say that. | ||
| It just doesn't work like that. | ||
| Yeah, how does the heckler's veto fit into all of this? | ||
| Because one of the things that I, again, see on college campuses is when hecklers start screaming at you and then you say, just a second, you know, if I'll get to your question or calm down or whatever you might say, they'll say, well, I have a right to free speech too. | ||
| They try to flip it on you to make you look like a hypocrite. | ||
| That actually kind of gets me, but I will give them a little bit of credit. | ||
| I think, say, a university event, and somebody comes in and they chant for 30 seconds, or they stand up and turn their backs, and that's the extent of it. | ||
| I think that we should protect that. | ||
| Technically, are they causing a disruption? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's minimal, and it's actually maximized the amount of free speech. | ||
| There has to be some room for very minimal disruption. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when it gets to the point where they are substantially interfering with the speaker's ability to get their message across, or the audience's ability to hear them through repeated shouting, or noise makers, or standing in the front and blocking everyone's views, and things like that, obviously that's a problem. | ||
| Last year we just saw a rash of heckler's vetoes going on, and it kind of all started with Berkeley and Milo Yiannopoulos, when the protesters were successful in shutting down the event through what had before that been unfathomable on a college campus for an invited speaker. | ||
| We've seen invited speaker controversies since FIRE was founded, basically. | ||
| Never Ever am I aware of any incident that came close to something like that. | ||
| It was just madness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they got away with it. | ||
| So few arrests were made. | ||
| And I can't help but wonder if the students out at Middlebury College, where Charles Murray was speaking, seized on that and looked at the Berkeley students and said, well, they were successful in stopping that event with speech that we also detested. | ||
| And they got away with it. | ||
| So let's try that. | ||
| It's a viable tactic. | ||
| This might be a solution for keeping the speech we disagree with off campus up. | ||
| And ideas like that, the tactics that students are able to successfully utilize, they will. | ||
| Behavior that is rewarded, essentially, is going to be repeated. | ||
| Yeah, and I see that all over the place right now. | ||
| So, for example, just a couple months after Milo went to Berkeley and that happened, Ben Shapiro spoke there, and it was largely nonviolent, but it cost the university $600,000. | ||
| To make that happen. | ||
| I mean, I think an ATM was broken and a couple windows and that's it. | ||
| But that's part of the tactic, is if we can keep ramping this up, we'll keep pushing the security costs. | ||
| And as I said, they had to move my event to a freaking hockey theater, hockey arena. | ||
| That couldn't have been cheap. | ||
| And several other of these I saw. | ||
| I'm sure you're familiar with the case of Lindsey Shepard up at Wilfrid Laurier in Canada. | ||
| and she just had to crowdfund, I think around six grand, to get security for one of her events. | ||
| So that almost seems like the new tactic. | ||
| It's almost like we don't have to, we can scare them with some threats of violence | ||
| and some other stuff, and then we'll cause the security costs to be so high | ||
| that you guys will just give up. | ||
| Well, and that's another problem we've been fighting since even before all of this came to a head | ||
| is colleges and universities trying to charge student groups security fees for the speakers | ||
| based on the anticipated protest or controversy. | ||
| And that's plainly unconstitutional. | ||
| It has been for a long time since the Supreme Court said that a listener's reaction is not a content-neutral basis for regulation. | ||
| You cannot charge More for controversial speakers because they might draw protest. | ||
| That places a price tag on expression and prices, like you said, it'll price the controversial expression out of the marketplace. | ||
| They're not going to be able to afford it. | ||
| What student group has $17,000 to spend on security? | ||
| None of them. | ||
| You know, what it comes down to is, administrators, the university itself has to be the guarantor of last resort when it comes to the speaker's ability to speak. | ||
| And this is the business they are in, and sometimes it's unpleasant, and sometimes it costs a whole lot of money. | ||
| But if you're not going to have a campus where we can discuss things and we can debate things, even if it gets loud and boisterous and raucous and contentious, which is everything free speech should be, if your campus isn't going to be a place where that occurs, then what are you doing? | ||
| So I do wanna make a point of saying that some of the campuses are getting it right. | ||
| And I'm sure you know some of the campuses that are doing a little better than some of the others. | ||
| But for example, at the beginning of September 2017, I spoke at Claremont McKenna. | ||
| They're doing a big free speech push because of what happened the semester before with Heather McDonald and all hell broke loose on the campus. | ||
| And I was completely welcome there. | ||
| And even some of the students who disagreed with me, I mean, they asked healthy questions and all of that good stuff. | ||
| So I always think it's worth mentioning that some schools are doing their best to manage some of this stuff. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And on two levels, I think. | ||
| First of all, FIRE rates policies at schools. | ||
| We rate over 400 different colleges and universities on a red light, yellow light, green light level. | ||
| Red light being you have policies that are Clearly and substantially unconstitutional, yellow light being you have policies that are susceptible to being applied in bad ways, and green light schools where none of their policies pose a serious threat to free speech. | ||
| In the past couple years, the number of green light schools that we have has nearly doubled, which is tremendous. | ||
| Now, still close to 60% of schools have a yellow light, so there's work to be done. | ||
| But you combine that with the 38 schools that have now put out statements expressly committing themselves to free speech, something that, you know, the University of Chicago kicked off a while back, there's reasons to be hopeful. | ||
| And we work regularly with administrators who are happy to have us consult on their | ||
| policies and say, you know, here are the changes we would make. | ||
| And we have amicable relationships with so many administrators, which is really gratifying. | ||
| But on the student side also, part of it is overblown, I think, by media. | ||
| There are a lot of students out there who do get it. | ||
| And people of all ideologies and all political sides, there are a lot of students out there who get it. | ||
| I speak to them on a daily basis. | ||
| And there is a lot of reason to have hope. | ||
| This is not a lost cause. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I think it's important talking about it because even again at that University of New Hampshire thing, 75% of the crowd at least was there respectfully, decently to hear ideas and do that. | ||
| What I felt was important after and why I still want to talk about it and have you here and all that is because I want people to be armed with the right arguments so that when these This set of people, even if it's just a smaller set that's just really loud, so has a disproportionate amount of influence. | ||
| I want people to understand there are tactics you can use to fight it. | ||
| So I'm curious, on that list of 38 schools that's kind of doing it right right now, when they've instituted some of these policies, and I remember when University of Chicago did it about a year ago, Is there evidence that things actually get better? | ||
| Because I'm going to guess that when you give some rules some of these students they don't want to be kicked out of school and they might actually behave better. | ||
| I think there's a lot of conversation right now about some legislation even that's going on about disrupting speeches and mandatory punishments for students who do so a certain number of times. | ||
| I think that's actually less important and I actually have somewhat of a problem with laws that create mandatory punishments for vaguely defined terms like disrupt, which could be applied to Pretty much anything. | ||
| A sneeze, you know. | ||
| I think more important is when an administration is saying, hey, these are the values that really, that this is the wellspring of intellectual vitality that our institution relies on. | ||
| These are the ideals you should be paying attention to. | ||
| This is what's going to make your experience really worthwhile. | ||
| I think students will listen to that instead of maintaining the policies that say, thou shalt not say mean things about Your classmates, that gets students in a very different mindset when they come to college. | ||
| Right, what are the statements, or what are the principles that you guys want to see in those statements? | ||
| The principles are just largely, this is a place of debate. | ||
| This is a place of intellectual exploration. | ||
| It is not our job as administrators or as faculty members to silence ideas that we find controversial, or protect you from them. | ||
| It is our job, it is our mission to expose you, even, to ideas that you might disagree with, and give you the tools that you need to analyze them, think critically about them, formulate your own ideas, and participate in the conversation. | ||
| Because that's what you're going to have to do when you leave After four or however many years you're here. | ||
| That's part of life in our democracy, is participation. | ||
| If you don't participate, then, you know, as the saying goes, if you don't participate you have no grounds to complain. | ||
| We have to really get students in the mindset that these are important life skills, and they're important even in other instances. | ||
| In the workplace, they can be important. | ||
| If you have a policy position, if you're working at a company that you think is either bad or is one that you want to promote, you have to be able to think about the people who disagree with you. | ||
| what they're going to say, anticipate their response, and formulate an argument that resolves | ||
| it. | ||
| There's countless situations in the world, outside of college, where being able to think | ||
| critically is incredibly important. | ||
| And really, I think that you get a lot of value out of doing that outside of the classroom, | ||
| because it teaches you how to contextualize the skill. | ||
| It teaches you how to apply it, not just in the, I read this assignment, let's talk about it kind of way. | ||
| Because that's really not how life works once you graduate. | ||
| I wish it was, it would make things a whole lot simpler. | ||
| You'd be out of a job, probably. | ||
| That's true, I would have to find something else to do. | ||
| All right, so we touched on the First Amendment a little bit in the first half, but I think there's also just a fundamental misunderstanding about what speech is related to the First Amendment, in that the First Amendment basically is about what the government is not allowed to do, and people have now extrapolated that to think it means what everyone can't do. | ||
| Can you talk about that? | ||
| There's that famous XKCD comic about people have the right to tell you you're an asshole on the internet, and it doesn't violate the First Amendment. | ||
| And that's true, although I see it all day long! | ||
| Yes, Sam. | ||
| I get that comic thrown at me sometimes, even when it's a government institution doing the censorship, so it's overused a little bit, too, and that kind of just gets in my craw a little bit. | ||
| But the First Amendment really only does protect you from the government, and it doesn't just protect you from Congress, it protects you from the states, it protects you from the municipalities, it protects you from the public colleges and universities and their administrators. | ||
| Those are all state actors for the First Amendment. | ||
| What it doesn't protect you against is your private employer, which means that I could well be fired for anything I say on this show today. | ||
| I'll see what I can do. | ||
| Not to give you any ideas. | ||
| Your parents don't... I remember saying free speech to my parents when I was very young, probably right after I read about the Skokie case, and my mother giving me a side-eye that would probably burn a hole through my skull at this point. | ||
| But, you know, it only protects you against the government. | ||
| It doesn't protect you from criticism of your peers or your contemporaries. | ||
| And it shouldn't. | ||
| You know, that's kind of part and parcel of having the public conversation is if you have a bad idea and you're out there spouting it, we all have the right to tell you, you got a shitty idea. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we should say that because otherwise, well, We might see that shitty idea spreading. | ||
| And that's kind of the point of, like we were talking about earlier, about letting these terrible ideas out there so that we can stand up and defeat them. | ||
| Are you seeing any major threats right now from the government related to free speech? | ||
| Because a lot of times I'll see people saying, well, Trump is attacking this or, you know, he attacks journalism a lot. | ||
| Now, it's no secret what my feeling about the mainstream media is these days. | ||
| I mean, I think it's largely just partisan garbage. | ||
| I don't think you should be, I hope that by mocking them and exposing their nonsense, we'll get a new generation of better journalists and people who really live to the code of trying to find truth and all of that. | ||
| But do you see a direct threat right now coming from the government, either from Trump or elsewhere? | ||
| There's always a direct threat. | ||
| I mean, let's be clear. | ||
| People in power will always, if given the opportunity, silence their opponents. | ||
| They will preserve the status quo. | ||
| And it's not just people in power. | ||
| It is an entirely human reaction to want to censor the people we disagree with, | ||
| we think we have terrible ideas. | ||
| That's kind of a baser instinct that we all have. | ||
| Now we have to overcome that and understand the value of not doing that. | ||
| But it's kind of understandable in a way. | ||
| That's why we have to be so vigilant in protecting free speech, | ||
| because once the tools are there, they don't go away. | ||
| And we've seen this throughout history, and they are wielded. | ||
| People laughed at me when I was talking during the election cycle to betray some of my personal political beliefs. | ||
| kind of talking about how the executive branch overreach, as many people did, of the last administration was problematic because, you know, what about the next guy who comes to power? | ||
| Maybe he's gonna do something crazy. | ||
| And nobody, they all laughed at me. | ||
| Hey, I was talking about that. | ||
| They laughed? | ||
| I was talking about it when Bush was doing it, I was talking about it when Obama was doing it, and I talked about it when Trump's doing it. | ||
| They laughed, and then Donald J. Trump was elected president, and I looked at them and I said, What now? | ||
| And, you know, you said, oh, it couldn't be possible that somebody we disagree with all that much, who we think is really terrible, would ever get elected president. | ||
| And when they started... | ||
| melting down over the election, I looked at them and I said, told you so. | ||
| Yeah, you can't be for executive actions when it's the guy you like, but then not for them when it's the guy you don't like. | ||
| Of course they're all going to do it if you give them the power to do it. | ||
| And it's the same thing with free speech. | ||
| And I think what's really important to remember is that those mechanisms, those tools of censorship are never ever going to redound to the benefit of the marginalized | ||
| communities that people are oftentimes seeking to protect. | ||
| It just doesn't happen. | ||
| The reason they are marginalized is that they don't have political power. | ||
| They're not going to be the ones implementing these rules. | ||
| And that's incredibly problematic. | ||
| And people don't understand that very practical reality that those tools of censorship are | ||
| going to be used to defend the status quo, which is what these people are trying to disrupt. | ||
| Disruption is kind of just the major threat that everyone in power feels. | ||
| And we've seen it throughout history that they're in the civil rights movement when protesters were arrested for sitting at lunch counters or for engaging in non-violent protests, but were arrested for disorderly conduct because people reacted to their protests in violent ways because they were violent bigoted thugs. | ||
| They were only exonerated because of the First Amendment. | ||
| And it took going to the Supreme Court. | ||
| And it's really important to remember, I mean, how many LGBT artists and authors and publications face censorship and have their materials deemed obscenity at times and not even sent through the mail, you know, sometimes. | ||
| before, you know, and preventing them from integrating into the national consciousness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's really, really important. | ||
| Yeah, so is there something happening right now via the government that you think shouldn't be happening? | ||
| I get the broad sense, sort of the blue sky version of this, that yes, people in power always are gonna wanna | ||
| maintain power and do what they have to do to silence people, et cetera. | ||
| At the college and university level specifically, I think a lot of it is coming from the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Education a few years back. | ||
| They had an agreement that they called a blueprint for sexual harassment policies at colleges and universities. | ||
| And it basically defined sexual harassment as any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature, including verbal conduct, which we also know as speech. | ||
| And the breathtaking broadness of that policy really kind of spread like wildfire. | ||
| And, you know, these harassment policies have always kind of been problematic at times. | ||
| This is directly tied to Title IX, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And, you know, it's one of the... I don't know if it's even an unintended consequence. | ||
| It might be a very well-intended consequence. | ||
| But you start seeing things. | ||
| For example, just a number of years back, there was a student at the University of Oregon who was sitting on a ledge in a dorm room window, and she saw a couple outside. | ||
| And as a joke, she shouted, I hit it first, which I didn't even know what that meant when it first came in. | ||
| And I had to look it up and realize that it was about Ray J having sex with Kim Kardashian before Kanye. | ||
| I guess that's a thing people care about nowadays. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, you know, Kanye is the leader of the free speech movement now, so. | ||
| Boy, maybe I do need to find another job. | ||
| But anyways, the couple was offended and ran upstairs and talked to the RA and the student was hit with several disciplinary charges including sexual harassment. | ||
| For just shouting, I hit it first. | ||
| And this is because of the latitude that these laws gave colleges to... Well, once the Department of Education said this is what we consider sexual harassment, no college or university administrator in their right mind is going to look at that and say, oh, we'll just ignore that. | ||
| They're going to write new policies because they don't want huge investigations that cost a lot of money, take a lot of time, and have ultimately the potential to cost the school all of its federal funding when it comes down to it. | ||
| So, you've seen the proliferation of these really broad policies, some of which have hilarious lists of examples of things that could constitute sexual harassment, like inappropriately directed laughter, or elevator eyes is another fire favorite. | ||
| These are all things that are known as flirting, recording, or whatever you want to call it. | ||
| I'm sure there's a cooler term, but that's how you meet people. | ||
| Sometimes it really is, and honestly, it's The sexual harassment angle has become a broader discriminatory harassment angle because a lot of these policies start to look the same based on any protected class. | ||
| And so when you say that any unwelcome comment based on a protected class, not drawn from | ||
| a particular policy or anything, is discriminatory harassment, well, that's a big problem because | ||
| that cuts off subjectively, whichever way you go, basically half of a debate. | ||
| People for instance on different sides of affirmative action are both going to find | ||
| their opponent's ideology probably offensive. | ||
| Of course, if you are against affirmative action for whatever reason you might be, | ||
| [BLANK_AUDIO] | ||
| People who support affirmative action are going to say, well, that is discriminatory based on a protected class, race, and they shouldn't be allowed to say that. | ||
| We've seen students hosting events like affirmative action bake sales to kind of make a point about what they think is the unfairness in affirmative action. | ||
| Administrators have tried to shut them down, and sometimes have succeeded in shutting them down. | ||
| I could give you countless examples of things just like that, but it's dangerous because it creates an orthodoxy of what we're allowed to say, what we're allowed to think, and there is no position That I can think of, and I can say actually I think there is no position that shouldn't be subject to challenge. | ||
| There is nothing that shouldn't be susceptible to somebody disagreeing with it in a public way and starting that conversation. | ||
| Nobody has the right to declare this is how it is. | ||
| That is I guess our collective, to circle all the way back to the beginning. | ||
| It's our collective right to participate in that decision of what we believe. | ||
| And that's why I have such a problem with this related to the way that the modern left deals with these things because if you're gonna say, all right, we're not gonna draw cartoons about certain things. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying you should go out of your way to offend people, but once you say we're gonna allow certain things not to be done, you've handed all of your faculty, all of your power, all of your decision-making capability over to a certain set of people. | ||
| It doesn't matter what those people believe in or are, but then it's like, well, then they know, well, we got them with something. | ||
| We can just keep going and going and going, and before you know it, you know, it's too late to fight back. | ||
| I mean, and again, it's going to backfire. | ||
| It's going to backfire against the people. | ||
| And I think that you see it backfiring sometimes. | ||
| You look at the faculty members recently who have been targeted by outrage mobs | ||
| and people calling for their heads or their jobs, sometimes both. | ||
| And they sometimes win, by the way. | ||
| My good friend Brett Weinstein still does not have a job. | ||
| Just recently, for a more striking example even, is Fresno State. | ||
| Fernando Gerrero tweeted some intemperate and not particularly polite things about Barbara Bush | ||
| right after she died. | ||
| And you're being very kind. | ||
| She can do whatever she wants, but yeah. | ||
| It was pretty nasty stuff. | ||
| My mother told me never to speak ill of the dead. | ||
| So I've done generally-- | ||
| No, I mean you were being nice to what was tweeted. | ||
| Feelings on Barbara Bush. | ||
| And it was the right that was calling for her head. | ||
| And I mean, one of my colleagues, I felt really bad. | ||
| I was the one who helped write the letter, but he was the one who wrote our public-facing | ||
| blog post on the website. | ||
| He was getting hate mail, probably still is getting hate mail, from people saying, how could you defend this woman, how could you? | ||
| I mean, it goes both ways. | ||
| Everyone's going to try and censor their opponent, so just really be careful. | ||
| Be careful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I'm glad you brought that one up. | ||
| So basically, this woman, she's a professor, right? | ||
| She tweeted some really nasty stuff about Barbara Bush, who had just died. | ||
| And by every account, Barbara Bush was a totally decent woman, but that's actually irrelevant for this. | ||
| And yes, then the right started screaming, she should be fired, she should be fired. | ||
| She was not fired. | ||
| Fresno State, she's still there. | ||
| I thought, wow, this is an exact example of how free speech is supposed to work. | ||
| She said what she wanted, People mocked her or supported her. | ||
| The university decided to make a decision. | ||
| Now it's interesting, if the university had fired her, let's say they had said these ideas are beyond the pale, and then people started digging into some other things that she's said that are pretty radical. | ||
| If that had happened, Would you guys have offered her a defense? | ||
| Because doesn't the university have the right to make the decisions that it wants? | ||
| I don't know what their policies are on tenure, for example, or that sort of thing. | ||
| But don't they have the right to employ people that they want to be employed or not? | ||
| Not that I want to give that power to the mob, because we know that the mob does awful things. | ||
| It depends. | ||
| When the government is an employer, the government actually is restricted in what it can do with respect to an employee's off-duty speech. | ||
| I think that's particularly important with faculty members who are supposed to be public intellectuals. | ||
| They're supposed to be out there discussing and debating. | ||
| This is what we expect out of faculty members at colleges and universities. | ||
| But when the government is the employer, and the speech is made as a private citizen on a matter of public concern, as this very clearly was, then the government has to make a pretty high showing that that speech so materially interferes with the provision of services that the government is involved in that it warrants overcoming the employees' First Amendment rights. | ||
| And we actually wrote a long letter, and it was co-signed by the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation | ||
| and a whole bunch of other organizations on Gerard's behalf and sent it in incidentally | ||
| shortly after they got our letter, the university issued their statement | ||
| that they weren't going to discipline her. | ||
| Right, so you are making the distinction in this case that because this was not on campus, | ||
| this wasn't being in a class, you know, taught in a class | ||
| or brainwashing students in a class. | ||
| That's different what she's doing on her private side and especially because as you said as a public intellectual you're supposed to be talking about stuff. | ||
| That that's different than perhaps if she had said these very same things in class they could have taken a different stance that maybe would have had a little more legal positioning. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| That's where it gets tricky. | ||
| Because there's a circuit split. | ||
| The Supreme Court back in 2006 held that speech made pursuant to official job duties is basically speech that's commissioned by the government and therefore does not have First Amendment protection and you can be fired for it. | ||
| But they did not decide whether or not that would relate to speech that relates to scholarship or teaching, as the Supreme Court put it. | ||
| Which is due to the special concern about academic freedom that we have for the reasons of faculty members being public intellectuals. | ||
| The Fourth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit, where California is, have both said that no, this ruling that speech pursuant to official job duties does not apply at colleges and universities to speech that relates to scholarship or teaching. | ||
| So in California, she could have been protected either way, but it's not that way all around the country. | ||
| Some courts have declined to find that exception to the 2006 Garcetti ruling. | ||
| Others have kind of Yeah, I'm curious. | ||
| for the time being. | ||
| So one of these days, the Supreme Court's probably going to have to make another decision on that. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious. | ||
| I know you guys are a non-partisan organization, but if these decisions were left up to the states, | ||
| do you guys have a position on that in and of itself? | ||
| I'm sure you have a personal position, but does FIRE have a position on that? | ||
| I mean, I think our position is that the exception for scholarship or teaching absolutely should be applied across the country. | ||
| It's really fundamentally important for faculty members to be able to conduct Controversial, disruptive, as it relates to the status quo, research and writing without fearing for their jobs because that's how we're going to get new ideas. | ||
| If you just talk about things that aren't going to rock the boat, if you just research things that aren't going to rock the boat, we're never going to get anywhere. | ||
| You need the bomb throwers. | ||
| There's room for that. | ||
| So what about cases where, and I guess this brings up a little bit related to tenure, because I think there is something interesting, because it's funny, I hear from professors, I get a ton of email from professors saying that they love what we're doing here and that they're afraid. | ||
| Sometimes tenured professors are still afraid of the mob. | ||
| They know they're not going to get fired, but they're afraid of the mob. | ||
| Is there an inherent problem in tenure, in a way, now? | ||
| Because if you have that protection, and I'm all for saying whatever you want to say, that technically, if you were a history professor, let's say, you could just start losing your mind and teaching really dishonest, complete reversal of the truth stuff, and have the protection of not being fired. | ||
| That actually handicaps the pursuit of knowledge from the university, doesn't it? | ||
| I'm not terribly concerned about that, because generally speaking, there are ways for faculty to be disciplined or removed, even with tenure oftentimes, for gross professional competency issues. | ||
| You know, if you are, say, teaching math, and you're teaching students that 2 plus 2 is 17... Yeah, I think that's in Common Core. | ||
| There's ways that the university can address that. | ||
| That's not really what we're seeing. | ||
| What we're seeing more often is, for instance, the professor who's teaching physics who is on the side of Holocaust deniers. | ||
| maybe not necessarily teaching that in class, but does that have any ramifications | ||
| for his ability to teach physics? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| That's not a competency to teach the topic that you were hired to teach thing. | ||
| But if it leaked into the classroom, then it's a separate issue. | ||
| Well, if you are teaching a class on physics and find some occasion to talk about the Holocaust, | ||
| I think you're probably not teaching the thing that you were hired to teach. | ||
| And then it's up to the school to decide what to do. | ||
| That's a different problem, I think. | ||
| I think that indicates pretty squarely, along with the denial that the Holocaust happened, that you are, in fact, losing your mind. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So what are some of the cases, maybe one or two cases, that you guys are working on right now or that you have your eye on right now that you think are particularly relevant that people should know about? | ||
| Well, we just issued a press release this morning, in fact, just a mere hour or two before I came here at Syracuse University where we sent a letter on Friday. | ||
| This one is just Yeah. | ||
| Let me pause you for a second. | ||
| I haven't read it yet, but I wanted to go to Syracuse to be in broadcasting because I wanted to be a news anchor or a sports center anchor is what I really wanted to be. | ||
| But they're a big broadcasting school, so I'm already fascinated by this as a place that's about disseminating information. | ||
| Well, you might be glad you didn't once you hear this. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| A fraternity had an event every year where the pledges or new members would come in. | ||
| It was a private event, and they would do skits that roasted the other members of the fraternity. | ||
| A lot of fraternities have this kind of tradition. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that mine did. | ||
| But they went through some skits, and one of them, for example, | ||
| was making fun of a member of the fraternity who was a known and vocal Trump supporter and conservative. | ||
| So they satirized him by having somebody who was supposed to be him starting a rival fraternity that was, quote-unquote, a white empire. | ||
| And to join, people had to take a horrifically racist, anti-Semitic oath. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So far sounds like it's all in good fun. | |
| Well, whatever. | ||
| It may be tasteless, but all in good fun so far. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| They're satirizing. | ||
| It's no different than you see comedians doing all the time on a stage, satirizing people. | ||
| Another one was... | ||
| satirized one of their brothers for being chronically whipped by his girlfriend and portrayed him as mentally retarded and had him in a wheelchair and all that stuff. | ||
| And this was all in a private event. | ||
| And you hear the laughter in the audience indicated that nobody was really offended by it. | ||
| They understood this was kind of just poking fun at people. | ||
| The problem is that videos of it leaked, and the student newspaper published them. | ||
| Which, you know, they had the right to do as well. | ||
| Can't begrudge them that. | ||
| And, of course, as you might imagine, outrage erupted. | ||
| And within a matter of days, the fraternity had been expelled permanently from campus. | ||
| Eighteen students have been charged with disciplinary code violations. | ||
| And they're being threatened with suspension or expulsion. | ||
| And this is, like, all right before finals. | ||
| And meanwhile, an adjunct faculty member had the gall to express concern about how the university was handling all of this, and they immediately told him, because your views don't align with ours, you are no longer qualified to teach. | ||
| At Syracuse University. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| It's incredibly authoritarian sounding. | ||
| They're just willing to steamroll over anybody who gets in their way in pursuit of really just giving somebody a head on a pike so that the crowd is mollified. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| They've charged them with sexual harassment, discriminatory harassment. | ||
| Never mind the fact that nobody who the speech was actually intended for Actually was offended by it. | ||
| It didn't... And it's not their fault. | ||
| You know, they don't know how the videos leaked. | ||
| They were posted to a private Facebook page and somebody must have had access to somebody's computer or something like that. | ||
| But the speech was purely private and nobody was offended by it. | ||
| And every conversation between two students can be the grounds for a disciplinary investigation because a third party later found out what was said during that conversation. | ||
| We'd all be in jail. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It reduces free speech to a complete nullity. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's galling, and the just really harsh and punitive bent of the university in all this is mystifying. | ||
| Wait, so just on the technical side, now because this is something good that Trump's done related to this, because he got rid of a lot of the Title IX expansions and all that, and DeVos, and they got rid of that stuff, which I assume you agree with, right? | ||
| Basically? | ||
| I mean, it's stuff that we had spent a lot of time fighting against. | ||
| Right, okay, so Obama expanded it, Trump got rid of it, I think in the name of free speech, when you hear stories of like Laura Kipnis, who I've had on, and many others, the witch hunts that happened that are crazy. | ||
| So these policies that they're saying that these students violated, these have nothing to do with government policies, right? | ||
| They're saying they violated school policies, is that correct? | ||
| Yeah, although their discriminatory harassment policies are obviously drawn on a lot of the same Language, because they receive federal money in the form of student loans and things like that. | ||
| So they actually still have to adhere to Title IX, even though they're not a state institution, obviously. | ||
| But, you know, they've been charged with this laundry list of offenses. | ||
| The administration has been rushing through trying to kind of get the process over with as soon as possible. | ||
| Meanwhile, not giving them really a lot of details until just recently in terms of You know, what the charges are based on and all of this. | ||
| I mean, it's very clearly a steamrolling and it's outrageous. | ||
| And, you know, that's kind of the most recent thing. | ||
| So tell me a little bit about how you guys get involved in that. | ||
| So, OK, so you issue a press statement now or a press release. | ||
| Now they know they have a little bit of public defense. | ||
| Do you guys actually work with the students? | ||
| Like, just kind of lay out how that whole process goes. | ||
| Yeah, so on our website we have a form anyone can fill out to request help. | ||
| Me and my team, every morning, we'll go through the case submissions and we'll review them and follow up for more documentation if necessary. | ||
| And like I said, we get damn near close to a thousand of them a year now, which is a whole lot of work. | ||
| We investigate and develop the cases and figure out what the best possible tactics in each case would be. | ||
| Usually the next step involves writing a letter telling the university, which in Syracuse's case we sent out on Friday, telling them, hey, this is the applicable law, or these are the applicable norms that you should be adhering to as a college, and here's why what you're doing has run afoul of all of that. | ||
| Generally speaking, we'll wait for a response in good faith, give the university some time | ||
| to acknowledge our concerns and work through them. | ||
| Otherwise we will issue a press release and start bringing public pressure to bear. | ||
| Sometimes in public college and university cases, we'll take it to litigation if we have | ||
| Not every case, obviously, because, you know, there's a range of cases that are, you know, make for a good lawsuit. | ||
| But even just recently, filed a lawsuit at Joliet Junior College. | ||
| And this is kind of, again, kind of flips the narrative a little bit, because it was a student who saw People basically talking about how capitalism is great and decided that she wanted to make a good point about socialism. | ||
| So she handed out, you know, and distributed flyers about how, you know, they said shut down capitalism, inviting people to like a workshop about socialism. | ||
| This was actually not far from where I live in Chicago, Joliet Junior College. | ||
| And she was actually confronted by a number of campus police officers who pulled her to an interrogation room, demanded to examine the flyers, and then confiscated them, saying, you can't do that here, you know, the political climate, you know, right now is, you know, you might start something. | ||
| I'm actually shocked to hear it happening that the story's not the reverse. | ||
| This is an odd one. | ||
| I'm glad you used it as an example, actually. | ||
| You know, it goes to show, I actually, you know, you'll be interested to hear this. | ||
| My team and I actually did a really quick analysis, and this isn't scientific or anything, of all the public cases that we have on our website from the beginning of FIRE's history. | ||
| And actually, more than half of them have nothing to do with politics. | ||
| More than half of them are simply administrators having power, again, and when they have the power they will use it, to regulate or silence speech that they find inconvenient or critical of the university or administrators or just kind of not nice generally. | ||
| Less than half of our cases had to do with speakers being silenced specifically because of the viewpoint they were espousing on a political level. | ||
| You know, it kind of undoes a lot of the narrative. | ||
| And to be honest, I'm kind of a little bit tired of the whole whether the right or left love censorship more argument. | ||
| I think it's completely unproductive and does nothing to solve the problem, which is we all need to understand why protecting free speech is important. | ||
| I'd much rather focus my time there. | ||
| And, you know, so It's really, that whole narrative could use a little deconstructing for a little bit, and I'm glad that we had that case that kind of allowed us to show it, and people appreciate it. | ||
| I got a lot of messages from people on the right who said, you know, I disagree with everything that that young woman had to say. | ||
| And I would sit there and I would yell that in her face. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I'm damn glad you guys stood up for her rights. | ||
| And you know, when I get messages like that, it just it warms my heart. | ||
| And I get them from people on both sides saying, you know what? | ||
| I probably wouldn't have reacted in the same way you did leaping to a defense of free speech. | ||
| But I'm glad you did it, because I got something out of that. | ||
| It made me think about why my reaction wasn't that. | ||
| And if I can elicit that in people, I feel great about my day. | ||
| That's the heavy lifting, I think. | ||
| Well, that's a beautiful thing, and that's why I dig what you guys are doing. | ||
| The final thing I want to mention is that I just remembered in this last moment that the reason that you're here, so I had wanted to have one of you guys on for about a year or so, and you've been on our master list of all this. | ||
| And then I think about three months or so ago, someone tweeted at me that they were at school, at a school library, and they were watching a video of me and Ben Shapiro, and that they were reported to either the diversity office or one of these things, that it was hate speech, and that another student shouldn't be allowed to watch these evil things, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| It turns out that this was in the UK, so it was not under the jurisdiction that you guys which obviously is the United States, | ||
| but it just shows that this thing, this monster that we're fighting | ||
| is not local to us here in America. | ||
| It's all over the world, and there are other organizations like FIRE | ||
| that do this work, and yeah. | ||
| And although it's depressing to know that somebody's being reported | ||
| for watching a video that I put out there, it's good to know that you guys all came to the rush. | ||
| You all came to the defense and you were like, who is it? | ||
| Can we connect with them? | ||
| You know, I connected them with some of your people, I think, and maybe you've passed them on. | ||
| Yeah, we connected them with Spikes. | ||
| Oh, okay, so there you go. | ||
| Yeah, it is, and you see it happening in Canada all the time, in the UK. | ||
| I have Google Alerts set, and every, well, I wouldn't say every morning, because it's more like 40,000 times a day, I get emails from Google with the latest headlines about free speech. | ||
| And it's not just even the UK and Canada. | ||
| There are students protesting in India about freedom of speech issues, in all kinds of countries. | ||
| Australia, it's a big conversation right now. | ||
| This is not limited to here. | ||
| It's not limited to anywhere. | ||
| The idea that college campuses are kind of both a microcosm of society and a training ground and a place where the ideas of the country kind of come from in a large sense, that's kind of a global I don't think that's limited to higher education in the United States. | ||
| I really hope that we can convince students that that's worth safeguarding. | ||
| It's too important not to. | ||
| Well said, my friend. | ||
| I'm with you. |
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