A few weeks ago, Lydia and Thomas did an episode on the steps of the California Capitol for California Freethought Day, highlighting the differences between a fake free speech professor-story and a real one. This juxtaposition sparked a research effort to dig into more of these cases, some of which will be featured in the following episodes. If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com. Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming?
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic can sound.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for every two everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I am Thomas that over there is Lydia.
How you doing?
Hello.
Doing pretty well.
Excited to present what we have for folks today.
Yeah, excited to share a live event we did.
This is the first live episode we've done for this show.
I guess that's true.
Yeah.
I guess that's, yeah, it would have to be for this show.
Sure.
Well, we almost did one on another thing, but we didn't.
That's true.
This show could be tough live.
Yeah, a lot of prep.
A lot of prep.
Speaking of, so this was California Free Thought Day, something I've done every year for a while.
Really appreciate David Diskin and everybody there and the invite.
And this time, rather than me hosting a panel, they're like, you want to just do a live episode of something?
And we're like, absolutely yes, because there's something that we've been wanting to talk about that I've been wanting to talk about for months, months, because it first came up with the Israel stuff and then it came up even more after Charlie Kirk.
And that is the real war on free speech.
Charlie Kirk.
I don't want to tell you.
It'll break your heart too much.
The real war on free speech that's happening as opposed to the fake war on free speech that's happening.
So that's what we decided to cram into a very tight time slot.
Oh my gosh.
We had 35 minutes, I believe.
I think that's right.
And I was like, okay.
Begged for more.
Yeah, we did.
We had 30 and begged for more.
And they're like, we can give you another four for some reason, four or five.
And so we used it.
They run a tight ship at Free Spell Day.
I appreciate it.
So what I wanted to do, the purpose of this event was to do like, here's the prototypical Where There's Woke lying story about free speech.
And we're going to dust off an old friend that you're going to hear about that if you've been listening for a long time, you'll remember, or at least remember somewhat.
I'll give a refresh.
And then the second half of the talk, the plan was Lydia is going to talk about an equivalent thing now, except it's real and 10,000 times worse.
So that was a format we tried for.
And I realized, oh, I'm going to have to cram nine hours of podcast into 15 minutes for myself.
So I did my best, but I think we pulled it off.
I'm excited for folks to hear this.
And we're sort of releasing this as an intro to you all because this was part of planning on doing a wider series, a bit of a mini series on the attack on free speech that's real that no one's fucking talking about.
I mean, some people are talking about, but relative to the hysterical nonsense when a professor wants to use the N-word or whatever, the amount of like outcry over like free speech, free speech, free speech that we saw in, you know, 2014, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, like all the way until I think around like COVID changed that a bit because then it became COVID and Black Lives Matter and that was more of the focus.
But pretty exclusively for seven, eight years was campus craziness, free speech, free speech, free speech.
And then something, which I'm not going to tell Lydia about, happened at Charlie Kirk and real free speech stuff happened.
And I've been wanting us to do a series and highlight some of the actual stories of free speech violations and when it's not hysterical the fire.org making up a bunch of fucking shit about it.
And the results are shocking.
So this is an intro episode of sorts because we're going to talk about not only the story that I think Lydia had to kind of rush through in this one, but we're going to talk about, I don't know, five more stories or something.
Six, I think, is what we came to.
Oh, I thought I was counting this as one of them.
No, no.
This would be a number seven.
Oh, so this was a different one.
You didn't even get to it.
There were six other stories that we're going to be talking about in this little mini series.
Oh, wow.
So my thinking was it was six and one of them was this one that you did in Free Thought Day, but it wasn't.
No.
Oh, okay.
That's even better.
We packed even more in for you.
So that's going to be the next few episodes of Where There's Woke is these really just gut-wrenching stories of actual free speech violations.
And so that's what you have to look forward to.
We were a little more behind than normal this month, as patrons will have seen because of two live events because we did this and we did QED.
We did a panel at QED, and that's in Manchester.
England.
Yeah, England.
Not like Manchester, you know, Wisconsin.
I don't know if that's actually a place.
Yeah, not the famous Manchester, Wisconsin.
Point is, it's far away.
Also had some travel adventures that were not fun.
Not fun.
Oh my gosh.
And they really significantly set us back.
Set me back mainly because of medication purposes that was lost when my bag was lost for no reason.
You know, our bags that we checked that are identical bags that we checked at the exact same time in the same flights in the same place and had sequential numbers.
Lydia's was found right away.
Mine took three days.
Yeah.
Because sure, because fuck me, that's why.
And Lydia doesn't have medication she has to take for her brain in her bag.
And I do.
So that's, of course, what would happen.
I have a lesson learned.
I had one day's worth on my person, but lesson learned.
Always keep your meds not in your checked bag.
That's an obvious one in retrospect, but I was like, oh, I grabbed pills for like a day.
That's fine.
No, no, never can be too careful, everybody.
And so that really, really set me back personally.
And then we're going to be-time difference.
And then it was Halloween.
And then we're like, holy crap.
That was a lot of stuff.
But we're catching up now.
We're getting this out to you.
And I'm really excited for folks to hear the real stories of free speech violations and start talking about them.
Try to get the word out about these.
So after this break, we will get to our talk at California Free Thought Day at the Sacramento Capitol, conveniently located for us.
Thanks for supporting the show.
Thanks for listening.
Support at patreon.com slash where there's woke.
After this break, we'll get to it.
Thank you.
All right.
Am I on?
Yeah, I'm on.
Okay.
Hey, can you hear me?
Is everything good with the mic?
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you for that introduction.
That saves me some time.
Because yeah, we are podcasters and the podcast that we're going to be doing a little live version of for you today is called Where There's Woke.
And in that podcast, we debunk fake anti-woke scare stories.
I've been debunking stories like this for at least 10 years.
And as you might know, you know, the pejoratives that I've been called and maybe some of you have been called over the years have changed, you know, the nomenclature.
It used to be we were the PC police.
That was the N-E-O-G-P-C police.
That was from like 1990 to like 2010 or so.
And then we were the SJWs, social justice warriors.
We can kind of trace the timeline, sort of like the rings of a tree by the different insults the other, the people have been calling us.
Then it got to regressive left briefly for like a couple years for the regressive left.
Yeah.
And then now I think we're on woke.
I think we're woke.
That's the last pejorative that I've identified with.
Although we might be transitioning to Antifa.
I don't know.
I'm not sure.
It feels like it.
I've paid my dues, so I feel like I should be able to.
To Antifa, right?
Like you're a dues paying member.
Yeah, yeah.
And of course, Lydia Smith, my co-host on Where There's Woke, we're going to do something.
I'm going to try to condense a story that we told in, I don't know, eight hours of podcasting into about 15 minutes.
I'm going to see if I can do it.
But I don't want to get too political on you all, but things aren't great.
They're not super good right now in many ways, whether it's the, you know, free speech, Christian nationalism, whether it's ICE, whether it's anti-trans laws, all this stuff.
And I wanted to talk about our show in particular tackles a specific kind of propaganda because we have a propaganda problem in this country, a really bad one.
And of course, there's all kinds, and it's easy for us as a skeptical crowd to say like, yeah, no, let's talk about how everybody else is falling for propaganda.
But I wanted to talk about a kind of propaganda that actually skeptics fall for quite a bit.
It's one that appeals to us.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to single us out as the cause of like where we are, but as a cause, I think propaganda wouldn't have gotten us where it has gotten us today if there wasn't some buy-in from the center and the left.
I think if it was just the far right, Fox News, MAGA right who believe this crazy stuff, I don't think it would have gotten as far as it has.
There's propaganda now that has been so pervasive that I guarantee you, some of you folks listening probably have had their entire conception of our country changed at least a little bit by some of this propaganda.
And it's perfect because we've debunked so much of it that there's almost like a prototype, like a paradigmatic story that we've debunked, that I've debunked for 10 years that I want to talk about.
And then to our horror, what's happening now, we've gotten to the point where now that story is actually happening.
So the fake story that they made up is now happening.
And we're in a crazy position where for years I've been like, you're making this up.
Oh, no, it's happening.
But now it's the right doing it.
And that is specifically around campus free speech.
And this, so if you've ever, if you ever, if you have in your head the idea that there's a problem with crazy college campus kids who shout speakers down and get professors fired, if that's something that you're, that, that maybe you think is true or that you're even vaguely is in the back of your mind, that is, I'm here to, my contention is that that is a result of a very concerted billionaire-backed propaganda campaign.
Because I've done a million of these stories and I'm not saying there isn't like a case somewhere that's not bullshit, but every single one I've looked into ends up being, sorry, BS, I'll say, in case there's any kids.
Every single one ends up being BS.
And so that's why I wanted to, I picked one as, again, kind of the paradigmatic story to show you what goes on and show you the machine.
Exactly.
And how asymmetrical it is.
That's the biggest thing is how asymmetrical it is.
And then after I tell you about this story that's from 2021, it's a little older.
Lydia is going to take us to now times and tell us what's going on now.
And you kind of can see the difference.
So yeah, so our story, the one I briefly want, how am I doing already for time?
Okay, shoot.
I'm going to try as fast as I can.
It's hard To pick, there's a million of these, but the story I wanted to tell revolves around a law professor named Jason Kilbourne?
Yeah, Jason Kilbourne.
I forgot his first name for a sec.
Jason Kilbourne.
So his story, I think, will give you an indicator of how this machinery operates.
I think a good way to do it, actually, is I wrote down a quote: Bill Maher is one of the worst purveyors of this propaganda.
And I want to read to you what he said about this college professor.
So on Bill Maher's program, sometime later, he says, there's a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago named Jason Kilbourne, whose crime was that on one of his exams, he used a hypothetical case where a black female worker sued her employer for race and gender discrimination, alleging that managers had called her two slur words.
Oh, mind you, I've edited out some bad jokes and crap.
I'm just getting to the point.
Knowing the extreme sensitivity of today's students, he didn't write the two taboo words on the test, just the first letter of each.
But because he merely alluded to those words, he was banned from campus, placed on indefinite leave, sentenced to eight weeks of sensitivity training and weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity trainer, and having to write five self-reflection papers.
So we're all skeptics here.
And the case I'm going to make to you today is that I love applying our skepticism, our free thinking to questions of religion and questions of God.
Absolutely.
I'm not saying anyone should stop doing that.
We also need to apply it to other things.
And there are places where we have not been putting enough focus, in my view, and this is one of them.
One sec.
So that sounds like a pretty extreme claim, right?
Doesn't that sound a little crazy?
As a skeptic, do you hear that and think, well, well, hold on.
So a professor put two bad words, one N blank, blank and the other B blank blank, in a law school question for the purposes of teaching, and he was banned from campus?
Doesn't that sound crazy?
Doesn't that sound crazy?
And I thought it sounded crazy.
And the sign of how bad our propaganda environment is is that doesn't sound crazy to 60% of the country now or something.
But that's crazy.
So I hear that and I think that can't be right.
No way.
Yeah.
And also I have a history of every single time I look into these, that's not what happened.
Every single time, every time that a national story comes across about this kind of thing, it's wrong every single time.
So do you want to know what actually happened to this professor?
Let's find out.
We love a good debunk.
Don't you love a good debunk?
This is a debunky crowd.
So here's what happened to this professor.
But first, before I tell you what he actually did, I want to tell you the quick timeline of how crazy this machinery is.
This professor, he gave a test at the end of a semester.
And then on January 12th, he rode a motorcycle.
No, give me a second.
I can't.
I'm too distracted by that.
Okay.
On January 12th, he received notice from his administration.
This is at University of Chicago Law School, UIC.
January 12th, he received notification that he was being suspended and that he needed to not go to campus, actually.
He was banned from campus temporarily.
On January 19th, do you know the organization FIREFIRE.org?
Do you guys know them?
They're a free speech organization.
Many skeptics, and there's a reason why I wanted to talk about this.
Many skeptics support this organization.
Many skeptics are part of this organization.
And Bill Maher himself was made religious, was a figure in the atheist movement for a while.
This is something that has overlap with skeptics.
Fire.org, one week later, wrote a letter demanding to know what happened.
So, okay, nothing wrong with the letter, right?
By January 27th, John McWhorter, who is a New York Times columnist, Harvard linguistics teacher, I believe, he had already done a write-up on it.
Mind you, we're a couple weeks in from this event, this random event at a university that no one should know about.
February 11th, UIC wrote back to fire and told them kind of the truth of what was going on, but pin in that for a moment.
By February 17th, thefire.org had rated UIC on their 10 worst colleges for free speech just because of this one incident where they said they were investigating a professor for something.
And by February 22nd, there was a New York Times.
New York Times.
Have you heard of them?
They're pretty big.
New York Times opinion column by Brett Stevens about this story.
Within one month.
Now, they had not even met with the teacher to start the investigation into the allegations at this time.
And already, hundreds of articles are online about how this teacher has been banned.
The woke left, the students, the crazy campus kids have banned this teacher.
They banned this professor from the college.
They banned him.
I'm telling you, if you Google it, it is 100% results in favor of this professor.
And it was within days.
This propaganda just network that we've been studying for years.
They go to work so fast.
They all echo the same talking points.
They hadn't even had the first interview with him for the allegation.
For all you know, maybe he did something horrible to a student.
You don't know.
They haven't even started the investigation.
But already we're getting a New York Times, the national newspaper is already writing about how this is an attack on free speech by the woke left.
And this is in 2021, by the way.
This is the historical again.
So that's how fast this unfolded.
The investigation did not even start until February 25th.
After we've already had a New York Times column and some prominent people cover it.
So that's crazy.
So to give the very short version of what actually happened, and the funny thing is, so much of our work demands that we filter through, you know, university like investigations of random professors and like all this crap, just stuff that no one should be caring about except the people involved.
It's a very minor thing.
School board meetings, I've watched a lot of those.
It's just the random stuff.
And so what happened with this professor was that he did that exam and a student had a complaint.
He had also had some other incidents of things that were like racially questionable that he said in his class.
Okay, whatever.
Honestly, not a big deal.
It might have been an opportunity for a student to complain.
There was a black law student organization that had concerns about his possible things that were a little, you know, racially insensitive that he was saying.
If he had just shut the F up, he could have had like one conversation and maybe like, maybe they'd make him do like one class or something that you have to do for work all the time.
And that'd be that.
But no, this is national news because he made a big deal about it.
And because he flipped out so much, he started calling people.
Whoa, that is alarming.
Okay.
He started calling.
He started, sorry, he started talking to students about it, angry that they had signed a letter against him.
And in one conversation, a black student asked him like, hey, have you seen the letter?
Oh, why haven't you seen the letter?
And this professor said, probably because the dean thinks I would be homicidal if I saw it.
And so the black student later reported that.
And because we live in a country of guns with shootings 40 times a day, there's a policy that if anyone, a student or a teacher, says something that's like they're going to be homicidal, then there's like, is this okay?
Is the wind going to take me out here?
Are we?
Yeah, I can't reach it.
Jeez.
Well, anyway, if anything like that happens, they have a policy where they need to be off campus while they temporarily evaluate, is this person a danger?
Now, you can disagree with like, okay, maybe it was a sarcastic comment, whatever.
But to represent him getting banned from campus for this test question is lying.
That's propaganda.
He did not get banned from campus for a random test question.
He got banned from campus because he triggered a security thing that campuses, because we've had a lot of school shootings.
And mind you, this was days after January 6th.
People were a little on edge for like angry white people yelling stuff at people of color.
They were a little like on edge about that.
And that was, there's so much more to this story.
How am I doing?
Oh, I don't have much time.
A little bit more?
Okay, a couple more minutes on this before we get to the second half.
That was what got him banned from campus.
What got him in a little more trouble, because that was resolved after they determined it was a joke within days.
What got him in a little more trouble, it's a lot of things.
I can't get into it, but the most egregious example for us that we thought was really like just awful was he emailed a stud a previous student that he that he had seen that he saw had signed the letter, you know, just asked, you know, about this question.
He emailed them responding to where she had asked him for a letter of recommendation.
So he pulled up an old email thread where she had gotten a letter of recommendation from him and emailed, I can't believe you do this to me.
How dare you sign this letter?
And so he was harassing students who had complained about him.
That's a thing that I think a professor should probably get a conversation about, right?
Like, is that unreasonable?
That if you harass students who have a complaint about you in that very personal manner, that maybe you have a workplace conversation?
That doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
So why is this national news?
Why does Bill Maher know about this workplace thing?
Why does the New York Times know about this workplace nothing?
Because there's a concerted effort to convince the country, and it's worked, that there's this free speech problem on campuses, that the students are crazy.
They're always complaining.
And the stories are pathetic.
Oftentimes it'll be like a student wrote an open letter.
That'll be the entirety of the controversy.
And it'll get reported as crazy students.
They couldn't even stand that this professor did.
And meanwhile, you learned there was no consequences for the professor.
It's 100 out of 100 of these that we've looked at.
And now, there's so much more to that story.
I think I pretty much all I have time for in this version.
Check out the actual show if you want to hear like eight hours of crazy stuff about it because it's fun on Where There's Woke.
But what I've noticed in the past year, well, I mean, there was a little bit of this after October 7th attack, but particularly after Charlie Kirk, we see that this story that I've been debunking for 10 years of these fake free speech controversies is now really happening.
So Lydia, why don't you tell us what's happening now?
Yeah, so just to give you some context, the New York Times ran a piece talking about how many people were being investigated, suspended, terminated for social media posts that they've been making about Charlie Kirk and their workplace, right?
So the New York Times at that point had said they had been able to find about 150 or so.
That number is so low.
It is so low because Texas alone, they have publicized this.
Greg Abbott has publicized this, that they are currently investigating about 300 teachers, just teachers within the state of Texas, because of things that they wrote on their social media pages, on their private Facebook, their private Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.
About Charlie Kirk or just barely relating to Charlie Kirk.
Just quoting Charlie Kirk.
I mean, I think a lot of us saw the quotes that he had about the Second Amendment, you know, that some people might die because of, you know, we have to have the Second Amendment, et cetera, et cetera.
I want to talk about one case in particular, though.
And that's out of Clemson University in South Carolina.
So the reason why I want to talk about this case is Clemson, Thomas had mentioned FIRE and the purpose that they serve.
FHIR had rated Clemson number 13 as like best school for free speech, whatever that means.
And they do these rankings.
We do not have time to dig into how they do these rankings.
It's nonsense.
We'll probably do an episode on that soon because I've learned a lot from preparing for this.
But they manipulate survey data, essentially, put their thumb on the scale through these other metrics that they try and try and make.
And then those rankings become weaponized by the right.
We saw this a lot with Harvard University, right?
And Harvard being brought up in congressional hearings and how terrible Harvard was for free speech and how it needs to be fixed, et cetera, et cetera.
Like Harvard is ranked the worst school by fire for free speech.
But at Clemson University, supposedly a great school for free speech, we just had a professor fired because of something he wrote on Facebook after Charlie Kirk was murdered.
His name's Joshua Bregge, tenure track.
Now, hold on.
If this is anything like my stories, you research it and turns out he stabbed a guy, too.
Does it any?
Did you find anything else?
You'll have to see.
Okay, we'll find out.
An assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, excuse me.
And on September 10th, his Facebook is completely private, by the way.
He reposted another person's post on Facebook.
Not even his words, but it's something that resonated with him.
I won't read the whole thing, but let me get to a little bit of it here.
Democracy should be built on ideas, not force.
But I am going to say this.
If anyone thinks that a reasonable price for the Second Amendment is countless innocent lives, and then that person has the cold-heartedness and audacity to say that empathy is likened to a social disease, they will get no protracted sympathy from me.
Unfriend me if you don't like hearing the simple truth.
I'll never advocate for violence in any form, but it sounds to me like karma is sometimes swift and ironic.
As Kirk said, play certain games, win certain prizes.
And then he stabbed a guy, right?
After that?
No, he just wrote that?
Just words on his personal Facebook.
He didn't even write it.
He shared it.
He just shared a post.
That's all he did.
Okay.
Now, what Breggie didn't know is that when you share something that is public on Facebook, it keeps those settings.
So even though his Facebook was private, now this particular post was public.
He realized that a few hours later, changed the settings for the post and made it private pretty much immediately.
And then took it down the following day because the university had reached out to him and said, hey, can you take this down?
It was up for less than 24 hours.
But in that time, the Clemson College Republicans had screenshotted it, went over to Twitter.
Sorry, I still call it Twitter.
I know it's not Twitter anymore.
I force a habit.
And they posted it on Twitter along with pictures of from like his profile pictures because those tend to be public of him holding a sign saying climate change is real and another one where it said black lives matter as a frame over one of his existing profile pictures.
Really controversial.
And they wrote with this, this is not an isolated event.
We have another leftist assistant professor at Clemson, Josh Breggie, in a now deleted post assenting to the idea that Kirk's assassination is a result of karma.
Who are you hiring, Clemson University?
End this now.
And then they tag in Libs of TikTok.
And if you've been following anything that's happening with the right wing and social media, Libs of TikTok, oh man, it's bad.
It's so bad.
We're so online.
I don't know if everyone knows what we're talking about, but this is our politics now.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, this is our politics.
All right, go ahead.
Quick aside for Libs of TikTok.
It's run by a single person, Hia Reich, who is, she's so into this that the superintendent of Oklahoma's Department of Education named her to the Library Advisory Committee to screen for books that should not be allowed in their schools.
She's not a parent.
She's not a teacher.
She doesn't live in Oklahoma.
Nothing.
She's just so incredibly vocal and important for the right wing that that was a move he made.
That's why I was saying it.
I'm sorry for us to be referencing like, oh, you know, this account, this account lives of TikTok.
Before that was pathetic.
Now it's like, oh, no, that's the Secretary of Labor or something.
You know, it's like, oh, no, this Twitter account is now the ambassador to the UN.
You know, like literally, it's crazy.
So that post from the Clemson College Republicans ended up being viewed nearly 500,000 times.
This is like a college Republican Twitter account.
Most of their things are 2,000, something like that.
But this was starting to gain steam.
By the next day, we started to see really, really intense Twitter back and forth.
So much so that South Carolina legislators were getting involved here.
And now they're saying things like another leftist indoctrinator has been identified in the Clemson faculty.
This is whose salary your tax dollars are paying for.
We can do better.
Take action.
Fire these radicals.
And then Clemson, you know, they're in a position, I guess.
They felt like they had to say something.
Here's another example of like how insane this whole thing blew up.
Their statement was viewed almost 14 million times.
Like I don't know that people really care about following colleges on social media to that extent.
But they said that they unequivocally condemn any and all expression that endorses, glorifies, or celebrates political violence, that they would investigate it, but that the investigation would be taken under consideration of the law, the First Amendment, the Constitution, et cetera, et cetera.
Big mistake.
They were like, yeah, we do have this First Amendment, though, so we're going to kind of maybe like use that.
Yeah.
That pissed off the legislators more.
So then they start firing back and said, this is the U.S. House of Representatives, South Carolina, one of the representatives there, Russell Fry.
Clemson is laughing at you.
They don't care what you think.
SC must rescue this institution from the tone-deaf woketopians that have taken over the school or cut their funding.
I'm a woketopian now.
Sorry, I didn't caught that.
Yeah, normally we say wokeys, but we can be a woketopian.
And then that created the South Carolina legislature to start talking about, yeah, we really should talk about defunding Clemson University, this public school, because they are letting these leftist radical professors take over.
Have an opinion on their personal Facebook that not even their words.
Not even their words.
Less than 24 hours.
And they were serious about this too.
Someone had asked one of those representatives, well, how would you do that?
You're not even in session anymore.
And she spelled it out.
She said, we should be able to come in, be called back into special session next week and make sure that our students are taken care of.
And what gets people's attention the most is money.
So when you start taking their money away, they start listening and can be persuaded to do the right thing.
The next day, this became more formalized because the members of the South Carolina legislature sent a letter to Clemson University.
And long story short, on the Joshua Breggie side, he's actually suing, thank God.
He was fired.
I didn't say that.
Oh, I know.
I'm getting there.
I'm getting there.
But he is suing.
And the ACLU is representing him out of South Carolina.
And they interpreted this letter.
They said, based on who signed this, they were absolutely serious about taking away money from this public university because of this one post that existed for less than 24 hours for someone's free speech, right?
And Clemson issued another statement once they got that formal letter on a Saturday, by the way.
And they weren't in session.
They all came out.
Sorry, we said there was a First Amendment.
That's on us.
That was wrong.
So they tried.
They tried to actually keep their hand in the First Amendment.
They said, we understand the frustration.
We share the deep concern over the nature of these posts.
However, we will continue to act within the bounds of the law and our university policies to ensure accountability and integrity.
So saying, you know, we are investigating, but we're really trying to stick to the Constitution.
Please be patient.
People were still not happy on Twitter.
Not good enough.
So then we get now all the way up to Donald Trump.
He's the president.
I don't know.
So the Clemson College Republicans, their tweet, their original tweet gets reposted by the leader of the Freedom Caucus in South Carolina.
Donald Trump reposts that and says that the post had said, that's it.
Now Clemson faculty is inciting violence against conservatives.
It's time for a special session to end this.
Defund Clemson and tenure at state colleges.
The Senate must pass H3927.
And Donald Trump reposted that.
And then that created more eyes and more views and more outrage in social media spaces for South Carolina to do something about this supposed takeover of a public college.
To be fair to Trump, anything that wasn't the Epstein files, he's like, oh, thank God.
Yeah, look at that.
Look over there.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.
So that was September 15th.
That was a Monday.
That same day, they met with Joshua Bregge and had a very short five-minute phone call where supposedly the person who was talking with him had let him know, hey, we're going to be letting you go.
I really regret this decision.
I'm sorry that we're having to do this.
You're a great professor.
Your students love you.
And I'm so sorry we're having to let you go.
The day after he receives his termination letter, and the language in that is very, very different.
It says, as I told you when we met to discuss this matter, your social media repost regarding this murder very soon after it occurred was irresponsible and unprofessional.
You did not show due restraint or respect, and you made no effort when you reposted to state that your views did not represent the views of Clemson University.
That his post had irretrievably jeopardized his ability to serve as an intellectual guide and counselor to students, and that he had undermined his professional fitness to continue to serve as a faculty member and ability to be effective in the classroom.
Then Clemson, immediately after that termination letter was sent, posted on Twitter and basically said, they're all gone.
Please leave us alone.
And there was celebration from lawmakers.
So we see, you know, this give and take, this back.
How did this affect the fire.org's rating of Clemson as a free speech university?
Well, it seems to have not affected it at all.
They don't even capture it in their ratings.
They said here, I have the quote, they said even having an investigation over Jason Kilbourne's test question, even having an investigation was why there were the top 10.
UIC was in the top 10 worst colleges for free speech.
And you're saying this actual firing from the state, from the president, the apparatus of government making a college fire somebody for their personal opinion on their Facebook that wasn't even anything.
That didn't affect free speech ratings.
No, no.
And Fire will say, you know, like we spoke up out about, we spoke up about this.
And when I look at that, it's a very general statement saying like, hey, stop firing people over your comments about Charlie Kirk.
And then they say, you know, in some cases, we've intervened and they hyperlink that.
Well, you click that and it's a letter that they wrote to Clemson.
That's the only one that they've intervened on.
And the intervention was them just being like, you know, the First Amendment.
Read up.
Bump up on that First Amendment.
Not talking about Joshua Bregge in particular, not talking about there's another professor at Clemson who was also let go as part of this.
Yeah, there's hundreds.
We're already out of time.
We tried to get enough in.
There's hundreds, though.
So this story that was fake, that was part of a propaganda effort backed by billionaires that I think is a big reason we're here.
A lot of people are under the impression that there's these crazy college kids doing this free speech stuff.
And that is part of what led to this administration being back on power and actually doing a far worse version of the thing they were making up.
And I'm sitting here just, I feel insane over this.
I mean, it's like the boy who cried wolf, but if the boy was part of an organized propaganda machine funded by big wolf, you know, like just billionaire wolves, pumping out story after story about how everything that wasn't a wolf was a wolf until the town sense of reality was so fundamentally warped that they actually elect a wolf as mayor.
That's what it is.
It's like that.
And then meanwhile, I was the boy who was calling not wolf.
I was like, that's not a wolf, not a wolf, not a wolf, until wolf mayor.
And I'm like, well, that is one.
That's a what?
And they're like, but we like wolf mayor.
He protects us from the wolves.
That's where we are right now.
And it's really sad.
And I just, as skeptics, this happened on our watch, you know?
This is something that we can't undo it now.
But all I can ask is that people be skeptical going forward.
When you hear a story about they went crazy, it still happens every day on Fox News and elsewhere.
Well, the kids went crazy.
The students went crazy.
Who's they?
What did they do?
What actually happened?
What happened?
Basic questions of skepticism ever.
You know, like if our society had been doing this from the start about this propaganda, and we're just isolating one type of propaganda.
I know there's so much, and this isn't responsible for everything.
But on this one thing alone, if you ask basic skeptic questions, well, who?
What happened?
You know, what happened to the professor?
Did they actually get fired?
You're like asking these questions.
Bill Maher, asking these questions.
That's what we needed.
It happened on our watch.
And now we have Wolf Mayer.
It's so disappointing.
I don't even know how to deal with it.
And I just wanted to say another thing I thought of.
I'm sorry to single out skeptics, but this was one, we picked this free speech one particularly because this was really, I think, one that some of our community fell for.
Because I think we are people as free thinkers, as skeptics who pride ourselves on being open to ideas and on debate.
And so when we hear a story about how some crazy kids somewhere weren't that, it's really easy for us to be like, ooh, that's, my identity is not that.
So I believe you that there were these people who are, you know, an other that is not open to ideas and is not willing to debate.
It's just easy for us to believe that.
But the truth is, it's just not really true.
I mean, it's just little events.
I break down these stories.
And in the end, one thing I like to do on our show is try to rewrite the headline how it should have been.
And it's usually like, kid complained about teacher.
And it's like, would that be a national news story?
Is there any reason we heard about that?
No.
Should there be a reason you hear about a teacher getting fired and the president of the United States making it happen through the government?
Yes, that you should hear about.
We should be hearing about that.
And so it's these kind of, I call it the context debunk too, which is like even just thinking about free speech at the workplace because that's what campus free speech is.
It's a workplace for professors.
Well, Amazon and Starbucks fires employees for saying the word union.
That's not seen as a free speech controversy.
That's not covered by fire.org.
That's worse.
That affects more people than what some college complaint that a college professor got.
So anyway, I know this is hyper-specific, but there's a reason we went this way.
And we're already out of time.
But thank you so much for listening.
Thank you.
Please check out Where There's Woke and be skeptical.
Ask questions when somebody gives you a story like that.
This is Manchester by the Sea, or is it?
I don't know.
I don't know, actually.
No, it's not by the sea.
Yeah, it is.
Manchester?
It is absolutely by the sea.
If all of England is by the sea, then sure.
Oh, it is.
I think forgetting that it was by the sea.
No, Edinburgh is by the sea.
Is that what you're thinking of?
Is that what I'm thinking of?
Are you sure?
Manchester by the sea is a movie.
Yes.
First of all.
And it takes place.
Where does it take place?
Is it a different Manchester?
It's a Massachusetts town.
Oh, okay.
I mean, it's closer than we are to the sea.
Liverpool is more like on the right there.
I don't know.
It's pretty damn close.
I don't know.
I guess you wouldn't consider it.
There's several hamlets between.
So you're right.
Yeah.
What?
So Manchester by the Sea is what?
Massachusetts.
Massachusetts.
Manchester, Massachusetts.
No, it's Manchester by the Sea, Massachusetts.
Oh, that's the actual name of the thing?
Yes.
Of the whole, like the town is named Manchester Sea.
I'm looking at it right now.
I'm looking at their town website.
Manchester by hyphen.
I know that because I did not know.
I knew it was in America, but I didn't know where.
And I only knew it was in America because of the movie.
See, I thought the movie just had that in it.
I didn't.
Why would you think a name of a city is by the sea?
That's a crazy thing to think.
I mean, it kind of makes sense with like New England and it being very like English, because that's also.
I will not sit here and have you gaslight me into the.
Yeah, I'm not gaslighting.
It's probably reasonable to hear Manchester by the Sea a film title and figure that's the entire name of the city is Manchester by the sea.
