Robert Kiyosaki and Ann Atkinson expose a free speech crisis at Arizona State University, where 39 professors allegedly intimidated students to cancel their "Health, Wealth, and Happiness" event featuring Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk. Despite the Lewis Center's mission to teach entrepreneurship and traditional values, faculty labeled speakers bigots, censored remarks, and secured Tom Lewis's funding withdrawal, leading to Atkinson's firing after she diversified revenue. Testifying before an Arizona Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, they condemn Marxist-driven censorship that silences students, prompting a mandated 60-day report on the university's handling of this academic suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
Robert, I'm going to start with you because I put emphasis on former in Anne's intro, but sort of you coming to ASU is what caused the former part in her intro.
So why don't you set us up as to why you guys are here together, and then Anne, we'll get to your involvement in this whole thing.
In 1965, I read this book here, The Communist Manifesto.
I went to military school.
I'm a ring knocker.
And then I went to Vietnam as a marine pilot.
I flew these babies in Vietnam.
You know, shot a lot of communists out there.
And then I came walking home, you know, Johnny comes marching home again, hurrah, hurrah.
I got spit on and hit with eggs at Norton Air Force Base just north of San Francisco.
Interesting, isn't it?
And I'm afraid what's happened to America is we have gone Marxist.
And so when Ann invited me to Arizona State University, which is the largest university in America, I said, no way, I'm not going.
Just because I had such a bad experience at the University of Hawaii, I got spit on there too.
I was in the MBA program.
And I dropped out.
So when Ann asked me, would you mind teaching at ASU?
I said, I'd rather go back to Vietnam and shoot people.
It's more honest.
You know what I mean?
I'm a sick Marine.
You guys understand that.
And so she said, I promise you, I promise I'll protect you.
And she did.
She's not just a Lewis Center, it's the Barrett's Honors College.
Dave, these were the brightest of the brightest.
You know, people I never hung out with.
That's cool.
And it was a fabulous, it was all an entrepreneurship.
I brought my oil guy in, my cattle guy, my 4-1, I don't do a 4-1 case, but I brought my stock guy in and all this stuff.
It was fabulous, and then Ann says, well, let's do it again.
I'm going, okay, she sucked me in.
So that was last summer, this, and so December, I mean, February, we did an event called Health, Wealth, and Happiness on Arizona State Campus University.
Health, wealth, happiness, featuring Dennis Prager and, unfortunately, Charlie Kirk, who we, as a marine pilot would say, we drew a lot of fire.
And these woke professors, 39 of them, came after us.
And Dave, we're still fighting.
That was last February.
We're at the Arizona State Legislature.
They're taking action against these 39 professors for intimidation threats.
I can't believe how Marxist and woke they've gotten.
So Robert, you called me a couple weeks ago and said, have you heard about this story?
I started doing some Googling.
It really was sort of blowing up in Arizona, but hasn't kind of made it national.
That's why I wanted to talk to you guys about this.
Because first off, this one, everyone knows me in free speech, but then this one felt personal because Robert, we're friends.
And then you're on stage with two of my other buddies, Dennis, who's become like a An uncle to me and Charlie, who's a good buddy of mine.
These are not haters.
These are not mean, evil people.
And you're talking about success and wealth and happiness, all of these things.
These are not far-right, crazy, mean, racist things.
So Anne, can you explain a bit about why you invited them and then what the pushback was that kind of led to the whole brouhaha and now how it's gotten involved with the state legislature even?
So for the last two years, I've been the Executive Director of the T.W.
Lewis Center for Personal Development, which is a center of Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State.
Barrett has 7,000 students, and the purpose of the Lewis Center was to teach those students about entrepreneurship, career success, happiness, personal finance, and meaning, but also to teach the traditional American values of personal responsibility, Hard work, civic duty, faith, family, and community service.
So in my role as Executive Director, we put on, and I oversaw, programming for the students.
And in the last two years, we had nearly 150 programs.
This was one of them.
The topics of health, wealth, and happiness were directly aligned with the intent of the Lewis Center, which was established by ASU and its Honors College.
So with this event, we decided to have A normal Lewis Hunter speaker program, but to make it available to the public.
The Lewis Center is not a political center.
This was not even a political program.
But health, wealth, and happiness led to censorship, condemnation, and chillings.
And ultimately, my firing and the firing of the person for the event venue who put this on on our behalf.
The 39 out of the 47 honors faculty ran this national condemnation campaign, which started with their petition that called Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk white nationalist provocateurs, bigoted.
Extreme anti-intellectual, anti-democratic purveyors of hate who've publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, and so forth.
And then Robert was accused of being dangerous because he teaches about debt.
So this didn't end though with the petition to their deans.
The professors went into their classroom where they teach mandatory honors classes to freshmen to condemn our program, our speakers, our donors, and the leadership and staff of the Lewis Center.
The professors used ASU resources, computers, equipment, and their official capacity to do so.
Which was which leads to state action.
That is a state actionable offense.
The professors went campus wide outside of the Honors College for help to drive a mission to condemn all of those parties.
And then they went further on a national condemnation campaign, painting this and labeling this as hate speech.
And I'll add, Dave, it's not just the faculty, the deans censored speech.
The deans of my college spent censored speech.
They told me Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager, and Dr. Radha Gopalan, who were on the panel, were only to talk about health, wealth, and happiness.
And they were not to speak about higher education or anything that could be deemed political or used as a political platform.
So in a university that's celebrated for its free speech policies, College deans undermine that by saying what speech was allowed and what speech wasn't allowed.
Further, the deans pulled down all of the marketing from the walls around the Barrett Honors College complex, citing it was offending the faculty.
And that's why.
They discriminated against our speech and they allowed opposing faculty to market an opposition event that painted our event as dangerous hate speech.
Well, this was the perfect opportunity for the new dean at Barrett, the honors college to eradicate the values that are evidently no longer allowed at the college.
So after the faculty attacked our donor, Tom Lewis, our main donor and our other donors, the Lewis center, the, after the Barrett deans mishandled the situation, Our main donor, Mr. Tom Lewis, who's donated millions of dollars to Arizona State over the last two decades, left.
The faculty scared him out.
So I brought in new diversified donor funding to keep the intent of the Lewis Center going, which, back to the first part of our conversation, included things like personal responsibility, hard work, faith, family, community service.
The new dean took this opportunity to dismantle a gem at the Honors College, and she said, the funding is gone, therefore we need to fire you.
Yet, and that between the time when Tom Lewis notified the college he would be terminating and the time that actually took effect, I brought in new diversified donor funding.
The dean turned it down.
So ASU is stuck firmly to the position on this that we lost donor funding.
Therefore, my position as executive director goes with it, but they're not saying that the dean explicitly turns down new funding.
She didn't ask, who are the donors?
Let's have a conversation, meet with the ASU foundation.
She was purely not interested.
She fired me effective June 30 when Tom Lewis's funding ended and dismantled a gem at ASU's Honors College and eradicated these values that are obviously no longer aligned with the college.
I mean, this really does sound like another version of what happened to Brett Weinstein up at Evergreen and has happened to a whole bunch of other professors and faculty at colleges across the country.
Well, certainly the teacher who had multiple students provide testimonies to the joint legislative session, confirming that she used her classroom to tell them not to attend the program, She's put out a public statement denying it, but she doesn't know there are recordings from within her classrooms that confirm the opposite of what she's denied.
Well, it's really unfortunate what is needed to happen.
As I've been taking the last several months to address these concerns internally, I've gone through all the proper ASU channels, I even went to the president of the university and the entire board of regents with a summary of basically what I testified about in our hearing this week.
The university told me, we allowed the speakers, but you then have to take the consequences.
And when I addressed the toxicity that's come around Barrett since our new dean came on board a year ago, they said it was my fault for inviting the speakers.
They didn't say it's a weak leader that brought with her a vacuum to the Honors College that allowed the faculty to run rampant.
So I exhausted all options to address things internally with my alma mater.
And unfortunately, it's taking legislative action.
So to answer your question, Dave, there was an ad hoc joint session between the Arizona State Senate and House of Representatives this Tuesday, July 18th.
And they investigated this free speech crisis at ASU.
I testified, another professor, Dr. Owen Anderson testified in support of free speech.
Seth Leibson testified and Dennis Prager even came here from California to testify in his defense.
So we had this ad hoc hearing, a five and a half hour long hearing to present the facts.
ASU is still denying that there was any wrongdoing.
I think generally ASU has great free speech policies and I keep saying we have one of the most free speech presidents in the pro free speech presidents in the country.
But all of this is undermining those policies.
So what happens next?
The Senate Judiciary Committee in the state of Arizona is taking this up.
They have ordered a 60-day deadline for Arizona State to report on the information presented, and they'll determine next steps upon receiving that report in 60 days.
Dave, this is the story of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, magnified a thousand percent.
My poor dad was a very, very good man, but at the core a Marxist.
And they're not bad people.
I support the freedom to choose.
But they don't know they are.
They don't know there are.
And they talk about, you know, America was founded not in 1619, like the New York Times wants us to believe.
America was founded in 1773.
It's called the Boston Tea Party.
You know, and I fight for freedom of taxes, and Marx says a progressive income tax is essential for the spread of communism.
So when you start, if you read this book here, You know, I wrote this book here in counter to it, it's called The Capitalist Manifesto, because I am a U.S.
Marine, I'm an academy graduate, and I fight for the freedom of principle.
I don't fight for people, I fight for principle, and allow us our freedom of speech.
I've already explored that with, with university leadership.
I'm, I'm clearly not welcome.
I certainly at Barrett, the honors college, Look, ASU, the world is watching.
This has become a national story.
ASU is an example in free speech, and they need to make it clear what they will and won't tolerate.
Right now, ASU is sending a message to the faculty majority that it's okay to bully, suppress, intimidate, and censor speech.
They're sending a message to people like me, who run centers or programs in the ideological minority, that you better not speak up because you will risk condemnation.
Retaliation and you probably will lose your job.
So I really I've been trying to appeal to the better people in ASU to take action to actually investigate.
But yet in these months, no one has asked me once for more information for a conversation where they can ask questions.
So I'm hoping that ASU will step in, but it might take action from the Arizona State Legislature.
It might take action from the Arizona Board of Regents, but this simply is a disgrace to one of the great universities in our country.
Anne, are you getting, I think you sort of just answered this, but I know when Brett was dealing with all of the craziness at Evergreen, he kept telling me privately how so many professors were supporting him privately, but nobody would step up and say anything publicly.
Actually, more students have reached out to me than professors, and the students say, look, I want to go meet with the dean, but I'm afraid I'm going to risk my grades or my living arrangements or have some retaliation if I do so.
The professors created a culture of fear around this event because they painted it as a white supremacy event.
Dr. Radhika Palan was raised in Sri Lanka, and yet I had to defend Comparisons to the KKK in a meeting with my dean.
The events operations manager who was fired at the venue was asked by the executive director of ASU Gammage, why did you allow a white supremacist on our stage?
So they're silencing the students with this climate of fear.
So it's the students that are really the concerning people that have been reaching out in droves to express their support for this, but their fear of retribution.
I'm an author, you know, but if I could write a book this powerful, I'd be proud of myself.
But this is, it's written in 1848, David.
It's more true today than ever before.
And what this book says that communism would take over America in two stages.
The first stage happened in 1930, when Columbia University, where Dennis Prager went to school, they invited in professors from the Communist League of Germany.
And so these communists came into Columbia University in 1930, and from there, rioting spread to schools all across the country.
So when I was at school, I went to the academy, Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, there was rioting at Columbia University.
And then there was Kent State and all that and, you know, Berkeley.
And rioting has spread across the country.
Unfortunately, those students are now professors.
You know, so I jokingly say that when I was standing, I came back to Norton Air Force Base, I flew in from Vietnam, I brought my 16 men home, all alive.
I'm getting hit on, spit on, hit with eggs and all this stuff.
And I jokingly say, because as you may guess, most of my audience is apparently conservative.
I certainly say, you know, I look at those audience of, you know, students my age, the hippie generation, the Woodstock generation, throwing eggs at me.
I said, I swear to God, that was Nancy Pelosi on the Chuck show.
We clearly see what the universities have done from way back then to exactly right now, which is the whole point of the book that you're holding that, to be clear, you did not write, but you're promoting it for all the wrong reasons.
I get why.
Now promote your own book so that people understand the antidote to that lunacy.