WTW112: How the Right Convinced Everyone There Was a Free Speech Crisis: A Case Study
We watched No Safe Spaces with our friends over at God Awful Movies this month and there was SO MUCH from the anti-woke archive featured in that "documentary" that we couldn't possibly take over GAM to debunk it all. For this episode, we're focusing on one particular story that we hadn't covered yet involving Dennis Prager being allegedly SILENCED at the University of Wyoming. **If you enjoy our work, please consider leaving a 5-star review! You can always email questions, comments, and leads to lydia@seriouspod.com.**
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 hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for every two, everything, everything, everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 112.
I'm Thomas.
That over there's Lydia.
How you doing?
Oh, I'm doing pretty well.
I'm excited for this one.
Did you feel ashamed after the last intro to, you know?
Yeah, I did some reflection.
Doing great.
Yeah.
No, I am excited for this one, though, because we're going back in history a little bit.
So this is a result of us going on God Awful Movies.
As we speak right here, it's not out yet.
It's going to be out, I think it'll be Monday, I'm pretty sure.
Imminently.
So yeah, within 24, 48 hours of when this is published.
But we wanted to do this because the God Awful movies that we did was a masterpiece called No Safe Spaces.
And that is, of course, a movie by Adam Carolla.
When I say movie, it's a barely feature-length documentary by Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager published in the kind of the peak of Adam Carolla, like the final peak of Adam Carolla's career, I think.
Yeah, when anyone still cared about him.
He was married and had people in his studio and stuff.
It was put out in 2019.
And it was really fun for us on God Awful Movies with Eli and Noah because it's basically a collection of every single bullshit political correctness slash woke kids slash, let's see, what were they calling us in 2019?
Was it woke?
Social Justice Warriors.
Yeah, Social Justice Warriors.
I guess we're getting closer to woke by 2019.
It's hard to remember exactly.
And they just rattle off just like story after story that are specifically things we've debunked over the years.
And so it was tough because there was some, like, how do we do that in a God awful movies?
Because we have to like go through the whole movie.
And that's not like the purpose of that venue either, right?
Like they're not there to necessarily like debunk things.
We didn't want to take over their show.
We almost did, but we didn't want to.
Yeah, I don't know how much it would be the right amount with something like that because it's like you want to do some amount of it, but otherwise the misinformation holds.
Yeah.
And then it turns into us where we're paralyzed by too many things to research.
And spiraling.
Yeah.
Welcome.
And so I was going to try to do some of this on there, but it ended up that like I did, we didn't have time.
And so I thought, hey, this will be a great way to debunk some stuff on Where There's Woke, classic Where There's Woke, historical debunk, and also, you know, cross-promote.
Check out God Awful Movies, which you probably already have.
Yeah, but it's always a good time.
It's one of my favorite shows.
So we're going to cover a particular event.
It's also like the broad culture war that let's let's be real.
I mean, they won.
Unfortunately, it's a bummer.
It's why it's.
They were wrong, but they won.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it's definitely.
It's why it's been a bummer, you know, the past since Trump won the second.
It's one of the many reasons.
When I created this show initially, I was excited to try to debunk this anti-woke stuff and take a look through history.
And, you know, we had barely begun that project when Trump won and they decided to change all the history and they just declared themselves the winners.
But it's also like reflecting on how effective this was.
This campaign against the left and against the college students using this free speech language was undeniably successful.
And I think it's worth studying it.
For one, I always love a good debunk, debunking some of this, but also studying the broader thing and looking at like, why did this happen?
Can we possibly learn how to prevent this in the future?
Because it will never end.
They will always go to this because it's so effective.
Yep.
The college student free speech stuff, it's a formula that is just like 100%.
Like it's just the batting average is so high.
Yeah.
And so just been reflecting on that.
I think this documentary was a particular chance to feel bad about it.
So we felt bad.
And misery loves company, so glad you're all here.
Join us.
So after the break, we will talk about a University of Wyoming talk that Dennis Prager gave and alleges was disrupted by protesters and was a whole thing.
And there's some claims made about it.
And also, tied to this is another claim from the documentary that I'll play the audio of real quick: that essentially the war on free speech of the mid-2010s or whatever was like the worst free speech has ever been.
It's like the low point of free speech.
And I think it's worth looking at some history to see that no.
Yeah.
Pretty much that could just be the show.
Look at history to see that.
No.
All right.
Well, we'll take a quick break and then we'll dig into it.
Support the show, patreon.com/slash where there's woke.
Thanks so much to those who do.
Thanks for listening, supporting, all that stuff.
We'll be right back.
We're going to play a little bit of this fun, fun documentary of when they won the war by lying.
Let's get introduced to the events here.
So, Dennis Prager, of course, radio host, conservative.
PragerU.
We did a whole deep dive on PragerU and all that stuff.
You guys can check that out if you haven't before.
Yeah, Columbus fan.
Yeah.
Awful conservative.
Cigar lover.
Yeah.
We learned that during this amazing documentary.
And, you know, like in terms of people, one of the like nicer conservatives, like I'm sure he's a good guy in most respects.
I'd rather hang out with him than Stephen Miller unless I get to do violence.
But his views are harmful and he's been good at spreading them.
And this is that documentary.
We're not really going to get much out of Corolla, which is probably for the best.
So they do this kind of false setup to this that's, you know, just for the documentary, but whatever.
It's Hollywood baby.
We're on the way to the airport, which is where I do much of my life, the airport.
You know, I go to all sorts of campuses from Berkeley to Columbia and everything in between.
So, you know, my hope is it's Wyoming.
It's a pretty conservative state.
All will be peaceful and tranquil.
It all began when students invited a special guest to speak about socialism.
Yeah, that's right, Aaron.
We were on campus tonight as hundreds lined up to see Dennis Prager speak about his views.
Discussion On Semites And Anti-Semites00:10:35
But before he even arrived to campus, other students who did not agree tried to stop his appearance.
We're essentially here because we don't agree with Mr. Prager's views at all.
He has said many hurtful things and hateful rhetoric towards underrepresented communities, of which Wyoming has many beautiful, diverse communities.
In the case of the University of Wyoming, it was precious.
Dennis Prager, noted compliment.
Noted bigot, racist, homophobe, sexist, Islamophobe, and anti-Semite.
I swear to God.
So word got out to the person who clearly knew me well.
It's probably worth dropping anti-Semite.
The guy is a well-known Jew, written books on Judaism, etc.
So they dropped that without a word of apology, needless to say.
They just dropped it, but everything else remained.
So that's the first thing.
We get this what seems to me to be completely artificial setup video where he's driving because I don't know why they would have filmed that.
Like, he just had a clip from when he was driving to the airport saying, surely this will all be great.
And there's not a lot of like similar footage like that throughout the entire documentary.
It's like really this one time where you get like the one established.
Drive and talk.
Yeah, exactly.
Where they probably did it after the fact.
They're like, okay, say this.
Yeah.
And they're like, we want it to lead into this news report.
So it'll be great if you say, surely it will all be great.
So there's that.
But then what really bugged me is this focus in on this one thing where he's like, someone called me an anti-Semite and I am famously Jewish.
So that's dumb.
And they're all dumb and all the kids are dumb.
And just, okay, when we recorded Gam, I hadn't found this.
I actually did find it.
Yeah.
I actually did find what at least the source of this kind of is.
But it's important to note this is the bullshit that they do.
It's such a perfect bulletproof plan for them for these provocateurs because they say awful things.
Some of them try to kind of hide it or sound reasonable, but their agenda is awful.
And all these ways of making it hard for people on the left to like make the case against them, their racism.
And obviously people on the left overplay stuff as do people on the right.
Like people do that.
Like people tend to exaggerate.
And so when Dennis Prager has said something that is largely speaking racist because it, you know, is in denial of systemic oppression and is trying to whitewash our history and is trying to make, he literally claims there's nobody is discriminated against.
Nobody is disenfranchised or anything in our society.
Like he makes that.
And so us largely on the left are like, yeah, that's racist.
Like it's essentially racist.
It's upholding the systems of racism.
But then we're talking about kids, 18, 19 year old, technically adults, the youngest form of adults, 18, 19 year olds, 20 year olds, 21 year olds.
And, you know, they tend to reach for the more extreme expressions of that.
So they call him a bigot.
They call him a, oh, he's a rape apologist because of this comment he made that we might get into.
I'm not sure if it's worth it, but we'll see.
And so then that's perfect for them because they get to just nutpick is the term, just find the worst examples of people who criticize them.
Yep.
Blow that up, paint it all as stupid, sit there nice and reasonable with all the privilege and power to calmly say how dumb these people are who are mad.
And it works every time.
I mean, it's just such a bulletproof thing to do.
But this thing about like someone claimed you was an anti-Semite.
Okay, we have no actual proof of that.
Like there is no proof of that.
But what I found was in the article that they briefly flashed, I didn't recognize it because they just did a screenshot of the graphic or whatever, but I actually ended up finding it.
It's from Campus Reform.
Ah, we know that very well.
Which we, yeah, love campus reform.
What a great thing.
This article describes kind of what's going on in obviously loaded terms.
But here's the proof.
You ready?
Here's what happened.
Here's the little paragraph.
One post in the discussion section originally included a contention that Mr. Prager was anti-Semitic, but that claim has since been removed after students pointed out to protesters that Prager is in fact of Jewish descent.
Ah.
So all we get is the word of campus reform without a screenshot or anything.
And then we get this weird statement that like the claim has since been removed after students pointed out to protesters that Prager's in fact of Jewish descent.
That doesn't really make much sense, does it?
Would you call, and I guess would you call them protesters if they're in the group?
But doesn't that sound like people who talk to protesters?
I don't know, whatever.
Either way, it's like the weakest of weak sauce.
It's campus reform insists, trust me, bro, there was someone who said anti-Semitic.
And maybe they did, but also who gives a shit?
Like it doesn't really sound like a person who's slightly less informed than everybody else.
It's a college student on a Facebook page in the discussion section in a comment or whatever.
Right.
And like, that's what he elevates to the stage to be the thing worthy of response.
Well, and the way that he talks about it too, it sounds like he makes it sound like there was an article written about him.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And that a reporter noted anti-Semite.
And he says he swears to God.
And it's like, there wasn't noted that's nowhere.
I don't can't find that anywhere.
Pin in that as a method of not having to engage in any sort of actual discussion.
But what's particularly frustrating about this is that the event itself was fine.
It was completely fine.
People protested.
He still got to speak.
He still had the stage.
He still had the megaphone.
People protested peacefully.
Nobody stopped anything.
They're outside, well within their rights.
And yet it didn't matter.
It doesn't matter how within our rights people on the left are.
If there's any protest to point to, they will paint it as the crazy college kids who are stopping free speech.
Yep.
Nobody's stopping free speech.
They did more speech.
They were out there doing speech.
It was all speech.
I agree with you that if someone had violently attacked him or had set off a bomb in the thing, done something that actually stops free speech, that's stopping free speech.
These people did nothing like that.
These students were entirely peaceful.
And it gets even worse because it was even more speechy and peaceful than you know.
If you didn't look into this, I want to play this.
Here's from a couple minutes later.
The only reason for the attack is that I'm known as a conservative.
This is a brainwash that they undergo.
If you are conservative, then you are not wrong.
You are evil.
They have to think we're evil.
Otherwise, they have to debate us.
Yeah.
As you'll hear me say if you listen to the Gam, the thing he literally just got done doing was smearing the entire protest against him by saying one person called him an anti-Semite, and then that way ducking the entire argument against him as a way of avoiding debate.
And then he just says this, which is they have to do this, otherwise they have to debate you.
It's like, hey, you did that exact thing.
You avoided debate by nutpicking and using one example that, like, in your opinion, was dumb, which by the way was revised.
It's like, okay, they changed it anyway.
And yet you can use that to throw out the entire concerns of those folks.
And then in the same couple minutes, you're then later saying they do it to avoid debating you.
But what's funny is, I don't know if you know this, he actually debated one of the students.
Oh, really?
One of the students agreed to call into his radio show before this, and they had a debate about it.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
This guy's pretty awesome.
I think that I'm not going to go through too much of this.
I think it's interesting.
But this student, I love this guy.
He's very calm, very sharp, and he, I think, does a decent enough job.
But unfortunately, he wasn't like the organizer.
And the organizer person was a girl who was responsible for the language that was, it was a bit overblown.
Like it went to the extreme of each thing.
So instead of it being that he's made problematic comments about such and such, it's like he's a bigot and he's done this.
And like, I get it.
Yeah, I think that can be a tough position to be in because like you want people to show up.
Yeah, exactly.
I know.
And it's, but, but at the same time, like, I think that that's in all of this, the main thing we have to sit back and remember is: wait a minute, we're talking about what students did in their Facebook group for a protest.
Like ultimately, that's why this argument is so good for them because it puts us in these dumb positions where we're like, well, was the thing the 19-year-old said a little too far?
Let's let's see.
We got the 19-year-old, then we have Dennis Prager, millionaire, multi-millionaire, immensely successful person, all the power and money in the world, especially at this point in 2019.
And so let's evaluate that person with that megaphone, the radio show that reaches millions and millions, the YouTube that reaches millions and millions.
And let's pit that against like, okay, a student used hyperbole that was a little too much.
Now, I think it's a good idea just as personal hygiene.
That's a lesson that I've learned over 10 years that you're just better off if you try to stick to more supportable insults, you know, like, especially, it depends on the context.
I mean, if we're just having a loose discussion or doing comedy or whatever, but if you are, if you're organizing, if you're, if you're making statements that are intended for people and maybe even the target of your criticism to see, it's just, you're better off if you stick as close as you can to like pretty well defensible characterizations.
It's better.
But again, this is minor criticisms toward literal students versus what he's doing.
Yeah.
All that is to say, what ended up happening is that then this student who called in, who I think was a pretty nice guy and level-headed, was kind of forced to defend all that language.
And he kind of did.
And I feel like maybe the student would have been better off if he just was like, ah, here's my specific.
Yeah.
Or just like, all right, I don't want to, she'll speak for herself and she's not here.
So I'm going to, I'll just say my particular things.
I don't know if it would have worked because Prager's goal was to just have him sound dumb and not give him time to really get into his stuff.
I don't know if you know this.
Radio fucking sucks.
This YouTube clip that has this interview or debate is 32 minutes and 40 seconds.
Every four seconds they go to commercial.
It'll be like, okay, and so my argument and we got to get a break.
Forced Defense00:14:12
And it's like, fucking A.
And then by the end, the student was like, oh, maybe, you know, maybe we could talk more.
And like, if in the question and answer, like, listener, or yeah, listeners are calling in.
Like, maybe if they have any questions for me, I can stick around.
And Prager's like, you know, you know, thanks, but no thanks.
I think an hour is more than generous.
Meaning in an hour, they had 32 minutes of discussion.
Wow.
And some minutes of that was going into and out of breaks where you have to do the like resetting everything.
Radio is just fucking the stupidest medium.
I'm so glad the podcast replaced it because getting to interrupt whatever is happening, the flow of any conversation every single four minutes with an ad just made it so nothing happened.
Like I listened to this whole thing and it was, it kind of sucked because it would have been fun to hear more actual argument.
But basically all Prager does is try to corner him into like the specifics of those insults that the other student put on the page.
And, you know, let's be honest, they don't quite hold up because they're hyperbole.
Like he's a rape defender.
I think she said he advocates for rape or something.
It's like, all right.
I mean, that's not, that's too far.
But I mean, it's a loosely speaking comment based on in his advice portion of the show talking about, you know, marriage and talking about like, he talks about happiness a lot.
And he has this thing where he says his whole lesson has been that, you know, you shouldn't let your mood, for one, you shouldn't inflict your mood on other people and you shouldn't let your mood dictate everything you do because sometimes you need to like go the flow and your mood might not necessarily be a good indicator.
And you should, sometimes you need to like ignore to work through it.
And apparently in an article, he wrote that, hey, if you're a woman and you're married to a good man, maybe sometimes you don't let your mood dictate that you don't have sex.
You can express your thoughts on that sentiment if you'd like.
For her to say it's like advocating rape is just seems like a, it's just like that gives him too easy of an out to say like, no, I was saying women should maybe consent when they might not be in the mood if they're in a good marriage with a good husband, which I'm not defending that, but like his point was she should consent.
So he was able to say to the student, hey, I was just telling women maybe they should consent.
If she doesn't consent, she doesn't consent.
And so he was giving a firm view on that.
It just gave him an easy out, you know?
You know, you know what's interesting.
So not the topic about what we're talking about today, but I actually from I follow a variety of like, you know, sex professors and different things like that.
And there actually is research to support that you still have to consent, but not necessarily like you're feeling tired or you're kind of in a bad mood, that that alone dictating whether or not you're having sex might actually just kind of perpetuate a cycle.
And so like a lot of times people will say like, if you find yourself experiencing that a lot, then try and schedule sex on the calendar.
And then, you know, it's now it's a commitment.
And you actually find a lot of times that it helps pull you out of that mood when you get to engage in that, you know, again, in a healthy, loving relationship.
So I hate to defend Dennis Prager.
I don't necessarily think he's wrong.
It's probably, you know, the language that he used probably wasn't great.
And maybe he made the point in sort of a sloppy way.
And it's also informed by, I think, really harmful conservative ideology about a woman being submissive to a man.
I don't love all of that, obviously, but I also don't think necessarily that the root of it is wrong.
I think saying he's advocating for rape is just too far.
Like it's just too far.
Like say something else.
By the way, that's a nitpick of a college student.
So it's in the scheme of things, not a big fucking deal.
But the only reason I'm talking about it is I did find it interesting.
I was excited to hear this debate.
And then it just, it got bogged down by that.
And it wasn't even what this student said.
And I felt like this student, he seems so nice.
I think he didn't want to throw his fellow student under the bus.
So he was forced to sort of say like, yeah, no, I agree with those things, but here's my argument.
And then his argument was like more reasonable, you know?
Yeah.
But then Dennis Prager then to criticize him a whole heaping.
Yeah.
He then utilizes that tactic of just sticking back to the, oh, wait, but then am I a rape advocate or whatever?
And then running on that.
And then the minute the student would be like, well, okay, yeah, no.
So sure, but like, here's my argument.
All right, break time.
You know, it's like barely ever let him finish an argument.
It's really frustrating.
And the other thing I'd say about Dennis Prager, and I might have said if I was talking to him about this, is like, well, I would sure hope that the first thing you said was, hey, husband, if your mood is horny, don't let your mood dictate that you have to demand sex.
You know, like, I hope he said that.
Did you?
I don't know.
Like, why is the, why is the onus on the woman in that case?
And maybe he did.
I don't know.
They didn't talk about that, but that would have been my first question, or I would have read the article or whatever to find some criticism of that.
But it's stuff like that.
But point is, I find it really hypocritical and basically dishonest of Dennis Prager.
He's basically lying when he talks in terms of like, they won't debate me.
They have to paint you as evil to debate you when he literally debated one before this event.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Here's another dishonest thing that he did.
He never addresses a significant reason why people were protesting.
And it's that the student association paid $10,000 to TPUSA, the group at the school to fund it.
And people were like, okay, so not only do we have to hear this asshole bigoted person conservative come paying $10,000.
That's literally from our fees.
The student group, it doesn't seem like they did anything wrong per se.
It seems like it was maybe some sort of first come, first serve thing and they applied and got a bunch of money.
So here's Morgan was actually quoted in an article as well, the student that he debated, Austin Morgan is the name.
It was quoted as saying in Laramie Live, which I guess is either a website or a newspaper or both about the place.
I don't know.
But he was quoted as saying, the University of Wyoming and Wyoming more generally is in a fiscal crisis.
At what point do we draw the line and say, you know, should we spend our resources on things like the Veterans Center?
How about the Non-Trad Center?
How about the LGBTQ Resource Center?
How about the mental health services on campus?
How about the student health service on campus?
Can we put this money to a better cause other than bringing this, frankly, this bigot to speak at the University of Wyoming?
It's unconscionable.
So, I mean, if you're going to talk about how they won't debate you and blah, blah, blah, it's like, well, at least engage with the argument that money was a big cause of it.
And Dennis Prager doesn't have an excuse for not doing that because also Morgan brought it up to him on the radio show.
All right.
So, so, all right.
So, she should have said apologist.
I'm an apologist for rape because I think that a woman, we already went through that.
A married woman who loves her husband should not be guided by her money.
All right.
Are you protesting?
Are you active in having me disinvited or in shouting me down or physically barring me?
There are three possibilities.
Are you involved in any of those?
I'm involved in a few, and I actually think we'll agree here.
I think that you and I both agree to the absolute nature of free speech, right?
People can say what they want.
I think both of us are in agreement on that.
As an aspiring criminal defense attorney, more than happy to defend people with controversial views, even ones that I don't agree with, based on their right to free speech.
No problem with that.
So, but I'm also saying that the activists also have their own kinds of free speech and that holding signs at your protest is well within their rights.
Now, if you're talking about getting the speech canceled, getting you canceled, right?
The issue there is actually an economic one that I think you'll appreciate.
I don't know if you know much about Wyoming.
Have you ever been here before?
I have been to Wyoming, but not to the university.
Not to the university.
What's your experience with Wyoming?
I have a great affection for it, aside from some of the great ski resorts, just visiting, like, you know, the national parks.
I've just been a tourist in Wyoming.
It's lovely.
And the people are nice and honest and hardworking.
And conservative.
And conservative, by and large.
You're right.
That's why they're nice.
You're a joker.
All right.
So you must know then that we as a state are in a fiscal crisis, right?
I did not know that Wyoming is in a fiscal crisis.
I presume most of the states are.
Yeah.
Government spend too much money.
What?
Yeah.
All right.
You think they're spending too much money having me.
Okay.
That's a separate issue.
So, so, but they are spending the money.
So did you ever, let's ask, let me ask you this.
Did you ever protest a liberal or left-wing speaker getting paid at the University of Wyoming?
Because if it's a fiscal issue, then that's what you should have done.
And I suspect you never did.
Such a good example of his bullshit.
I have raised concerns about how the university spends its money.
Okay, but you've not actively done.
All right, but you haven't actively done what you're doing in my case.
We'll be back in a moment.
Final segment coming up.
Dennis Prager here.
Cool.
So commercial again.
I've wasted a bunch of time.
I just love this mode of argument that this is another thing that conservatives do.
It's constantly this game of like, oh, okay, but can I find a place where you haven't done the same exact thing in a different circumstance?
Like it doesn't, it just dodges the argument.
You know, it's like if he's saying the only reason I'm saying that you should be, that we should cancel it is a money reason.
Like he's saying, yes, I'm going to protest your speech, but in terms of the cancellation part, that's mainly the money thing.
And instead of like engaging with that at all, he has to go to his assumption, which is that he probably hasn't done that for people on the left.
And it's like, okay, he would have to answer 50 questions first.
Like Prager would have to be like, well, have you had a speaker on the left who cost $10,000 fucking dollars?
Maybe?
No, probably not.
I don't know.
Maybe they have.
And if so, what was it?
And if so, did you protest against that expenditure of money?
Now, the student is saying that he has as he goes to break and just talks over him and says, No, you haven't essentially.
Yeah.
Which is like, look, if you're going to say you haven't, you have to let him say, yes, I have.
Like, why do you can't?
Why would you know better than he would?
You know what I mean?
Like, I think that's a stupid argument and you shouldn't really worry about that.
But if you're going to proactively bring up, like, I bet you haven't, and then not accept his answer that he has, that's kind of dumb.
But it's also a thing where it's like, well, why is it even a good argument to say, like, you're okay with spending on money on important stuff, but not dumb stuff?
You know, like, maybe he still would be like, yeah, if we have a talk that I think is valuable, I think it's worth spending some money.
If it's a talk where we're hearing the same tired bullshit bigotry that we all are familiar with, I don't think we should spend $10,000 on it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can consume that online, Dennis.
Yeah.
So the student debated him on all this, was totally respectful about the First Amendment, talked to him about the money stuff, and yet still all of their propaganda was about how the students shut it down and the blah, blah, blah, and they can't argue and they can't do anything.
And here's the other thing: they even had a debate among the students.
Like so much debate was had.
Like it couldn't be more opposite of the caricature and the smear that like these college kids can't handle argument, which is the entire movie.
Listen to the god awful movies if you want.
The entire fucking thing is that the crazy leftist kids, the colleges, they can't hear disagreement, safe spaces, blah, blah, blah.
Same crap you've always heard.
Here we have just a microcosm.
This is the reason I wanted to zoom into this one event.
As a microcosm, he basically lies about everything they said.
He won't listen to the concerns.
He actually debated one of them.
And before this, the students held a debate.
The debate group, actually, there was like a debate club there.
It was like, hey, why don't we feature a debate between like the people who think they should have the talk and the people who are kind of against it.
And they had an interesting debate where it was like, yeah, tough to draw a line on speech that's harmful, blah, you know, whatever.
They had the conversation.
Double debates happened.
Yeah.
And yet it still goes down as like, these kids can't debate, can't handle anything.
They can't handle different blah, blah, blah.
It's over and over.
10 years is fucking shit at least.
Probably more.
Yeah, it's so funny.
One of the things that really stuck with me when we watched the film as well is the motion picture.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Was like, I think Heather Hying is talking about it where she's like, you know, the kids are so fragile, you know, between helicopter parenting and safe spaces.
They're so fragile and weak.
And, you know, that's a problem.
And it was just so striking to me because the entire time they're showing footage and from everything that we've, you know, looked at too, I'm like, what I see is like strength and conviction.
Yeah.
I don't see weak little kids at all.
I see young adults stepping into their voices and power.
And you guys just don't like it.
Yeah.
The fragility is on the part of the fucking adults that are like, how dare they protest me?
Yeah.
Every single time.
The difference is power.
Yeah.
They're being fragile and not even allowing protest.
And then the difference is they have power.
So we only hear from them.
We only hear from the person with the power and the megaphone and the power all goes that way.
You're totally right.
It's like the fragility.
Talk about Brett Weinstein, the most fragile fucking asshole.
That's a separate thing.
Again, you can listen to the god awful movies or our history.
You know, my episodes on SIO or something.
Who knows?
But certainly the fragility of not being able to even engage in the debate without straw manning and like ignoring and smearing the entire other side is fragile and not being able to hold a debate when they literally did debate you.
Like it's just, it's just lying.
Yep.
Power Dynamics and Free Speech00:10:00
So now I want to talk about another part.
Boy, and I could just go on forever, but I'll try to try to keep this sort of short.
But here's the other part that I mentioned that I teased that I want to do.
The only reason why you have a First Amendment is to protect the rights of minorities, the rights of the oddball, the rights of the underdog.
Free speech battles on campus in the 1960s.
Gregory Berkeley, the free speech movement in 1966.
Were primarily about whether or not you could have politics on campus.
And that was the start of the free speech movement.
From 1964 on, it took over campuses all over the country.
And I think it was so successful that there was probably a perfect week in 1977 when free speech was protected on campus at a level it never had been before and would be again.
Probably right around the time Star Wars came out.
The phase that we're in right now is the most distressing one.
Sometime around 2013, 2014, the students themselves started demanding new speech codes or that people not be invited to speak or if they were invited that they be disinvited.
Both Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde had to withdraw themselves from giving speeches at Rutgers and Smith Universities.
That was when you first started hearing about trigger warnings, things like microaggression training.
We're not sure if we even believe in freedom anymore.
Most universities today don't require classes in civics, courses to know the fundamentals of the Constitution.
Instead, we have classes on the things that divide us, identity politics.
If we don't have an understanding of the foundations of our society, we're in jeopardy of losing it.
So yeah, Lukiyanov is saying, literally saying, I don't want to get it wrong.
He seems to be saying at least strongly implying that now, as in 2019 or whatever, starting in 2013, 14, is like the worst time for free speech because it was great in the, you know, after the speech movement in the 60s, into the 70s, and then now it's the worst it's ever been.
And just a reminder for, I mean, wokies are going to know, but Greg Lukianoff, head of thefire.org, we did a whole episode at least on them.
Yeah, we've done, we've done some.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's very telling that he says like, that's when you started to hear about trigger warnings.
It's like, yeah, you know, that is when you started to hear about trigger warnings because this whole fucking thing is a mirage.
It's a propaganda campaign.
And it literally is not true that it only started in the mid-2010s.
In this very article that I was reading on this University of Wyoming thing, something caught my eye that I thought was interesting and kind of like, oh, shit, which was, but after Prager was long gone, the question remained, should the student organization have spent the $10,000 to bring such a controversial speaker?
I just want to include that because it's like, yeah, fucking no.
Anyway, it isn't the first time this question has come up.
Back in 2010, 1960s anti-war activist Bill Ayers was banned from speaking at UW after donors, politicians, and others applied pressure to the university to drop him, even though the subject of his speech wasn't controversial, but was rather about education reform.
So pausing there, do you see any asymmetries going on here?
Yeah, I mean, it's similar to what we talked about like with the Charlie Kirk stuff.
You have people in politics and positions of power in like state legislatures and stuff calling and demanding schools to do something for stuff that they don't like.
Right.
The free speech crisis that Lukiyanov talks about, that's the reason it's the worst, is essentially students usually peacefully protesting, making signs, maybe chanting.
Sometimes maybe one or two of them goes a little far.
There isn't anything that's like super far.
The couple examples they point to, I mean, we've gone through so many.
There's a couple where it's like unclear that it was even students.
Like the Berkeley stuff was just like people came in from everywhere.
A lot of that was just riots.
Yeah, and I made the point on GAM as well, but I'll make it again.
It was over the course of eight months that all of those things happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And sure, there's a few examples here and there.
Largely speaking, it's students expressing their speech about what they want at their campus.
That's free speech.
That's, that's not countering free speech.
That's more speech.
That's engaging in speech.
And honestly, with as much money that students have to pay to go to college, like I want them to do that more.
Like you guys should be demanding more.
Their tuition dollars that so much money.
That helped spend $10,000 fucking dollars with this asshole.
Good point.
And in 2010, and I don't seem to remember there being a dedicated propaganda machine bringing this up over and over and over and over.
It wasn't students.
It was donors, politicians, and others.
Moneyed interests.
Yeah.
People with power.
And they didn't just make signs.
They pressured the university to drop him.
They got the university to actually drop him.
And then the students sued.
And that forced the university to let him come.
Good.
So like, again, it's so unfair.
Fundamentally, it's so fucking backwards.
And that is just one example.
So that meant that the people with power just dropped him or pressured the school to drop him.
And then the students, some some number of students had to sue to get to reverse that.
So stuff like that has been happening to people on the left, especially during the Bush years with anyone who was anti-war.
I have a bunch of examples of it.
I could just name off a couple for fun.
Let's see, 2002, Noam Chomsky.
I mean, I'm sure he has a lot of examples, but there were some protests when he spoke at Harvard, 2002.
An anti-war guy, Nicholas Dijanova, spoke at Columbia, and there was a big backlash to get him fired.
And I'm just listing these.
My overall point here is not to look into every single one, but to say like there wasn't a free speech crisis in the mid-2010s.
There was a manufactured story.
And my evidence of that is that this stuff has been going on to people on the left, but there isn't an organized propaganda machine about it.
Yep.
If we had one, you can imagine how these events would have been painted.
So a movement to fire this guy after anti-war remarks.
Then Chris Hedges, this is a pretty big one.
At Rockford College, he gave a commencement speech and it was disrupted and like his mic was unplugged three times and like because he's anti-war.
And he still ended up getting through the speech.
But this one is, here's some fun stuff.
Afterwards, Hedges was skewered in the conservative press for his America bashing while the hecklers were lauded for their patriotism.
Talk show host Sean Hannity called for Hedges to be fired from his job at the Times.
And the National Review managing editor Jay Nordlingers referred to in a column to that astonishing commencement address at Rockford College, the one that caused students to revolt.
Bless him.
Wow, you're encouraging cancel culture.
You're encouraging the hecklers veto.
The guy who invited Hedges got death threats and had to change his phone number.
And I can't find the quote right now, but what ended up happening is somebody issued an apology, but it wasn't to Chris Hedges.
It was to the students for inviting him.
Oh, wow.
And Hedges was like, look, you invited me.
Like, there's no way you only wanted a bland commencement speech that's like, look around.
I didn't impose myself on you.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of these events.
Protests that were treated as potentially criminal, like just like putting an upside down flag, you know, like all this discourse that was heavy cancel culture stuff.
An invitation for Michael Moore was revoked.
There's another guy.
This one's interesting, Ward Churchill, who said something.
He did say something quite quite inflammatory regarding 9-11.
He very much like kind of blames the U.S. for 9-11.
And like, he's got some views that people would have a hard time with.
But at the same time, when you look at all these fucking arguments that these assholes give, it's always, hey, you should be offended every day at college.
You should be offended.
Yeah.
You should be offended.
Okay.
Well, then you can have a guy who says like, well, it was kind of the U.S.'s fault that we got attacked on 9-11.
Oh, no, that's not okay.
Like, oh, isn't that just you getting offended?
And yet that person got stuff canceled.
Everyone tried to fire him.
I think they couldn't because, you know, the law still would say like you can't get fired from a public university because of your political speech.
So that's good.
But there's tons of these examples.
And just imagine, by the way, for however many there already were, and there were plenty.
Imagine.
If there had been an entire infrastructure devoted to making these happen, because that's what they do on the right.
They make these happen because they say inflammatory shit, they get invited to these places and they want a protest, so they make it happen.
If the left had been trying to make this happen, imagine how many there would have been.
You know, like it, just this is how it has been for I mean, I don't want to like both sides it, but like kind of, like it's kind of been that way for both sides, but only one side has a megaphone and a propaganda machine.
I think that like, there are a lot of students who might try to go too far in protesting and speech, and we've seen there are people on the right and I think, when it comes to universities, like I think the legal system has been pretty good, weirdly, on this.
I think that it is up to the universities to maintain that balance and and let them know that people can protest, certain set of people can have the talk, and there's lines there that you can't really go over because the shoe will be on the other foot, and the shoe was on the other foot, especially in the 2000s about anti-war stuff right, and uh, it's like, that's fine.
There doesn't need to be a national controversy over this.
The system is actually working when it comes to that, for the most part from just a purely like free speech view.
Right, not getting like political really for the moment, just looking at like is there a quote unquote free speech problem?
No, like it's, it's pretty much the law is pretty good on that for now.
You know, when it comes to this stuff and that is what it is it's a manufactured controversy.
Doesn't need to exist.
Just some of the Ayers stuff too, because there's plenty of cancel culture of him too.
Professor's Misquoted Wishes00:05:24
Do you know?
Ayers did.
Have you talked about him?
He was the founder, one of the founders of Weather Underground and okay, he became a professor after that and worked for, you know, like 30 something years University OF Chicago and he's an education professor and forever they kept trying to cancel him.
He was the one they tried to link to Obama because he like also lived in Chicago and like right right, heard of something with Obama once and it was like no man, we're not like I know him, but like you know, but they, they made a huge thing out of it and talk about like smearing and all the stuff they talk about the left doing Ayers had when he retired from Chicago, from the University OF Chicago.
There's a thing they do with basically every single professor where they get emeritus status, for example, quote, no one can remember the last time it was rejected.
And yet they did with Bill Ayers when he retired.
They rejected his because the chair of the board was Christopher Kennedy, son of Robert F Kennedy, and in a book from 1974 they allege that Ayers dedicated the book to People, among whom is Sir Hans Sirhan, who assassinated Robert F. King.
Right.
Now, I don't think that would be good.
I don't think Sir Hans Sirhan was like a good person to dedicate, you know, like that's bad.
To get clarification, Ayers says he never did that.
He wouldn't have done that.
He dedicated the book and they dedicated the book.
It was one of those books that's like written by multiple authors.
The dedication reads, to Harriet Tubman and John Brown, to all who continue to fight, to all political prisoners in the U.S.
And then here's the thing: here is Ayers' story.
His version is an artist was set to make a backdrop of that.
And the backdrop is a wall of hundreds of names.
One of them is Sir Hans Sirhan.
Okay.
And I guess that artist viewed Sir Hans Stirhan as a political prisoner.
Ayers says he disagrees with that.
He never would have done that.
Who knows?
I don't know.
Like maybe Ayers is also kind of blurring it.
Maybe he was fine with it at the time.
Maybe not.
But like point is, this is a thing from 1976.
And he retired in 2010.
Wow.
And they're denying him a merit of status.
Here's what the right does.
They won't even let someone be like, no, that wasn't what I meant.
And I don't mean that.
And I wouldn't dedicate a book to Sir Hanserhan.
Like the left, you know, it's often they'll fully be like, I didn't mean it that way.
I don't mean it that way.
And sorry if you took it that like going over and above, but they'll be like, no, you meant it that way.
And they'll still cancel them for stuff like that.
Yeah.
You know, and it's like, meanwhile, on the right, it's stuff like, I'm an unapologetic racist.
What of it?
And you're like, well, I think maybe you shouldn't work here.
Oh, you're cancel culturing me.
You know, it's like the difference in these examples and the fact that he can't even get away from this stuff when he's actively disowned it.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's shocking.
Yeah.
The other thing, this is just like bad luck, but just down the airs, there's plenty more to talk about Ayers.
But one thing that was really unfortunate that happened was someone interviewed him from the New York Times and they misquoted him.
And I actually find this pretty plausible.
And Ayers wrote later on wrote a thing where he like stated it in no uncertain terms.
Like they just straight up were dishonest about what I said because the headline was no regrets for a love of explosives.
And one of the quotes was, Do you wish you had done more?
And he says, I wish I had done more.
And he was talking about like to oppose the Vietnam War.
Oh, yeah.
And then they're like, oh, to blow things up.
Yeah.
She made it seem like he wish he had planted more bombs.
You know, and he was like, no, that's not what I meant.
I meant, I wish we had done more.
We didn't do enough, you know, to oppose the war, the illegal war.
And this is back when like they do the like, I don't know, phone interview and then they do the write-up.
So it's a quote.
The reporter quoted him as saying, quote, I don't regret setting bombs and quote, I feel we didn't do enough.
And when asked if he would do it all again, he responded, quote, I don't want to discount the possibility.
So that makes him sound like we didn't plant enough bombs and maybe we'll do it again.
Yeah.
Now, here's the, here's the other thing about this.
This article just so happened to publish on a date.
September 11th.
Literal September 11th.
Oh, no.
It just happened.
And obviously this would have been printed like, you know, in the middle of the night.
So it wasn't like, but this happened to be published on September 11th.
Wow.
And so on September 11th, the actual one, not like an anniversary, like the one.
2001.
He's the reporter quoted him as saying, I don't regret setting bombs.
You know, like, wow.
So he obviously, like, he was pissed.
And he wrote this and was like, this is absolutely false.
I said I had no regrets when it came to like being against the war and doing what we could.
And by the way, the couple bombs that they set were in empty offices on purpose.
Right.
They classify it as, you know, extreme vandalism, but never intended to hurt anybody.
And they did, those bombs didn't.
The ones that he was, you know, that he claims responsibility for.
And he, he said, I wish I had done more about the war.
He never said, I wish I bombed more.
But the way that the quote was written up, and I find that plausible.
The guy's, the guy has been a professor for 30 years or whatever at this point, 20 years.
He's not, you know, like he was anti-war and he was part of that, but he, he has a long history of being like, we killed no one.
I didn't want to kill people.
The only people who died were three bomb makers who accidentally set off a bomb and killed themselves when it came to at least Ayers.
They Won the Culture War00:03:38
No matter what, though, he can't get away from that characterization and they just use it forever to the point where they're smearing Obama in 2008 on that still, like just for maybe like having met him.
You know, it's just like, that's the cancel culture they do and have always done.
That's the kind of smearing and bullshit they did.
That's the anti-free speech stuff they do.
He was hounded by this for the all of the 2000s.
Stuff was canceled all the time.
He couldn't speak anywhere.
You know, like that has always existed.
That did exist then.
It still existed during the 2010s, I imagine, but all you would hear about is the conservative ones.
And I just thought it was a fun trip down memory lane to show that, no, this wasn't a new thing that happened in the mid-2010s.
They just made that up.
Wouldn't you know it, Greg Lukianoff being a little flexible with the truth?
God, it's so infuriating.
Yeah.
It's just so frustrating because it's been such an effective propaganda point to the point where they won.
They won the culture war on this.
They won.
Now we'll see if we can maybe, you know, start a new war.
We can like win, win a different branch of the culture war.
And culminating in, for one, Trump's first election, but for two, Trump's second election is just like, yeah.
Yeah.
They have successfully smeared the left to the point where our entire discourse is based around a false impression of the left.
And I mean that on the left and right.
The whole thing, virtually no one speaks about this period of time accurately.
They all buy into the premise that like there's the crazy college students and they went too far and the blah, blah, blah.
They all buy into it.
And in my opinion, is a false fucking premise manufactured by the right and by constant provocation too.
Like if you specifically are provoking people, you're going to get them to say some things you can use as bad examples, especially when those people are college students.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And just for, you know, additional historical context, campus reform was started in 2009.
It did start off as like a social media site and then it morphed into a news site where they pay conservative students $50 a pop for every article that they write exposing their professors that are too liberal.
So we're talking about kind of this culmination at this particular period of time that it might not actually accurately reflect the nature of free speech.
Yeah.
We can take a lot from that and we can learn a lot about their tactics.
And really, I don't know what to do about this because it's, it's such, it's such an intractable problem.
It's such an effective thing because people will always be drawn to this fucking high-minded speech about free speech.
They'll always be drawn to that because it feels intellectual.
It feels right.
And it feels, it's just a framing that will always work.
And I don't know what actions we can take to change that other than fucking somehow dismantling the right-wing misinformation machine.
It's the only thing I can see.
I don't know how that's going to happen.
It's really hard.
But I hope this helps make the case that this whole fucking shit is bullshit.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening, everyone.
And yeah, check out God Off of Movies.
That was fun.
It's much more funny.
This was a good trip down memory lane and important.
So thank you for putting in the work.
Thanks, listeners.
Thanks, patrons.
And we'll see you next time.
University of Wisconsin talk.
Wyoming.
A Little Secret Revealed00:00:38
University of Wyoming talk.
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