SIO40: Actually, Berkeley Is A Fierce Defender of Free Speech

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 40 and I'm your host Thomas Smith. I've got what I think is a really interesting episode for you today. I'm going to break down what's really going on at Berkeley with all this, the Milo, the Ann Coulter, all that stuff. I've looked into it extensively, and I think I've got kind of some interesting conclusions for you. So Look really forward to that, but also, of course, the one time I record Thursday's episode early, all hell breaks loose in the news. People are asking me about Comey. I think we're gonna have to look to Tuesday's opening arguments for a more in-depth explanation from Andrew. So sorry I'm not addressing that today, but definitely we want to make sure we've got all our facts right and that we react appropriately.

0:01:18 Thomas: So Tuesday's opening arguments, definitely tune into that one. But let's get right over to some commentary.

0:01:32 Thomas: So I don't know where all of you are on this whole campus free speech, alleged kind of war that's going on. I don't know. And I think you know where I am. Maybe. We'll see. I've adjusted a little after doing all this research, a little bit. But one place I think we all need to be on the same page with is with actual facts.

I think think that it's one thing if we want to disagree to the extent that something is an issue, that kids screaming on campuses or speakers being disinvited, whatever it is, we can disagree on what kind of issue that is and how big of a deal it is. Which ought to be able to establish a set of facts and at least agree on those for the most part. And that's the first part of this for me, what happened with Ann Coulter.

Well, according to uh Pete Boghossian, you know, you know I'm a huge fan of uh Boghossian, he tweeted four times, four times after Ann Coulter voluntarily withdrew from speaking four times he used the word disinvited and he essentially was castigating anyone like Berkeley or whoever he thought I don't know who he thought disinvited her but he was like one of of the tweets, and this was not ambiguous. This was not me nitpicking language. He explicitly said in four tweets that she was just disinvited. One of them, for example, was a picture of Darth Vader striking down Obi-Wan Kenobi, and his caption was, Ann Coulter moments after her disinvitation. So that's very explicit.

0:03:04 Thomas: It's totally wrong. She withdrew. There's nuance to why she withdrew, I'm going to get to that, of course, but she was not disinvited. It makes one wonder, I guess, if she's able to do this to herself, to strike herself down in the Obi-Wan Kenobi sense and make herself stronger, what's to stop her from doing this all the time? The answer is not much. She seems to have been a good PR move for her. Same kind of with what happened with Milo. So, but let's get into it. I'm going to, I'm gonna, the other, I guess the other misconception people are under is that Berkeley caved to a heckler's veto. I've heard that a lot. It's in the words of the lawsuit. We're going to look at a little bit that the Young America's Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans filed so that's also a misconception I'm going to explain why But so I tried to tweet at Pete Boghossian to correct this misconception.

0:03:59 Thomas: As usual, I found it impossible to penetrate his safe space that he creates where it's just a little Twitter echo chamber for him. But nevertheless, in order to explain these misconceptions and what's going on at Berkeley and what I find so interesting, we got to go back to the, because the Milo story is actually critical to the Ann Coulter story. But let's go back to the whole Milo thing, take you back to December, uh, when the Berkeley College Republicans decide for God knows what reason that they want Milo Yiannopoulos to talk at their university. Now keep in mind, this is a mere month after Milo, in a talk given at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, put up a picture of a trans student of that college and said, quote, "The way you know he's failed is I can still bang him."

0:04:53 Thomas: And this was someone who was born male was transitioning to being female. I just want to make sure everybody realizes just how disgusting this is. I know now that Milo finally did something that a lot of people dislike. Now I don't have have to prove this point. People were like, oh yeah, Milo. But remember, before Milo did what he did more recently, he was controversial for sure, but there were a lot of people supporting his right to speak. What he did, imagine that. Imagine you are a college student and your classmates invite a speaker who has millions of followers, a wide reach on the internet. And that speaker puts up a picture of you to a crowded hall of your jeering classmates. And he essentially roasts you.

0:05:38 Thomas: He makes fun of you in front of your classmates. You've done nothing to this person. You don't know this person, it's just merely being trans and transitioning as the student was, is such an offense to Milo that he had to do this. Apparently, imagine that, though, can you, can you, do you guys realize how disgusting that is? This is not a ha ha troll, "oh, he's so provocative, he's a provocateur, oh, I get it, he's he's super, he's gay and that's why he gets away with being all cheeky." And no No, bullshit. That's all. Just think about how just disgusting doing that is. Going to a school and targeting a student. Now, I just real quick, I'm going to dismiss again, even though I already did a few episodes back, but for two seconds, just because someone will comment.

0:06:28 Thomas: So this student had stopped going to classes at the time, but didn't withdraw from the school until the end of the semester, but they had stopped going to classes, classes. So now, so Milo later on took that and spun it to look, "Oh, look, she had withdrawn from classes. She wasn't going there anymore." First off, even if that were true, this is still a disgusting thing to do. Secondly, there's no way at that time, back in October or whatever it was, early November, that he would have known she stopped going to classes. She didn't, she said afterwards she had stopped going into classes and then withdrew from the school, but he wouldn't have known that. So, that's a BS excuse. And even if true, this is still a monstrous thing. But despite this just having happened, this Berkeley College Republicans group wanted him to speak?

0:07:16 Thomas: Can you just, again, think about that. Think about what that says to any trans people on campus. Why? Just like, why would you want to invite this guy to speak, but anyway, they did. And when they did, the chancellor of Berkeley issued an incredibly principled and strong statement about what was happening. And in it, he said, yes, this guy sucks. He is a troll. Role. He has nothing interesting to say. He does despicable things. He says despicable things. We do not in any way support him being here. However, however, he says in the statement, I'll link all of this, by the way, you guys always know I link all my sources.

0:08:02 Thomas: I'm going to link all these sources. In the statement he says, there's the first amendment in this country and any student, Berkeley itself does not invite or disinvite anybody, any group, any student group here at Berkeley is free to invite whoever they want and we cannot censor it based on content. A strong First Amendment position. I think a laudable one too. So they said despite the fact, and he even said in the thing, I urge the college Republicans to think about what it means to invite this a-hole here. I'm paraphrasing.

0:08:39 Thomas: Please reconsider. This guy is a threat to students' well-being in some ways, like just please don't do this. But given that it's done, we are making arrangements. We're making it happen because that's the law. That's what we have to do. That is our responsibility as a university. That's a shockingly strong First Amendment position to me. I mean, it shocks me because Berkeley has been depicted as, oh, they used to be about free speech. Now they're not. Well, here is someone who literally threatened a student by name. And by the way, this chancellor's email goes on or statement goes on to talk about that specifically. Now, this is interesting to me because that's where I draw the line. In my book, I think universities ought to be free to say, this guy specifically called out a trans student.

0:09:27 Thomas: We're not allowing him here. That's despicable behavior. But Berkeley said, they said, look, we've gotten a lot of student concerns. We've heard from a lot OF students who are saying, you know, look what he did to this trans student, and they said—the chancellor said, unfortunately, even this kind of speech is protected by the First Amendment. It's all in the statement, which I will link to you. He said, even direct attacks on individuals, assuming they're not of imminent violence kind of thing, even those attacks are protected by the First Amendment, whether we like it or not. So even with that knowledge in hand, it's not as though Berkeley just didn't quite look into it or they didn't know who this guy was. No. Even with all that solid knowledge and student complaints saying, hey, look at this, they still said, I'm sorry, we're bound by the first amendment.

0:10:14 Thomas: We're a university. We have to protect this incredibly principled position, and I, and again, I want to say, like, I actually, that's further but on the free speech spectrum than me. I consider myself staunchly pro-free speech, but on the spectrum of, it's not really left-right, that's not fair. On the spectrum pro- free speech, anyone can speak at any university all the time, and students ought to, maybe on the other side, students ought to be able to restrict speech that they don't like. I'm kind of definitely on the first side of that, maybe a little toward the middle, added. I'm definitely more anti-students being able to shut down speech, because I don't like that, I don like students shutting down speech. But in this case, I actually think there should be a policy that would allow for, if a speaker has a history, or or suspected, of specifically targeting a student, I mean, that is student safety right there. That, so that's, that's, it's amazing to me, learning that, I I didn't know before this that Berkeley had specifically seen or addressed that.

0:11:12 Thomas: That's, wow. I don't blame people for protesting when he's done this and the school is like, "Sorry, that's protected by the First Amendment." I mean, they're right, but I think there ought to be some allowance for, this person is a threat to specific students at our school, possibly, to this. There was a letter that went to someone at Berkeley saying that it was suspected, now this is not proven, but someone suspected that Milo had planned to out individual undocumented, undocumented students. And the support for this is based on, I don't know, someone had some inside knowledge. Plus, there's a link I can send you to an article up at Breitbart that's still there today. I went there today. And it said that Milo was taking this opportunity speaking at Berkeley to announce a call for, or Berkeley's funding to be withdrawn, because it was a sanctuary campus, according to him.

0:12:07 Thomas: There's some like Freedom Foundation or some crap that he was working with to essentially end. Illegal immigration in the country, stuff like that. And so even armed with that specific knowledge that Milo might have intended to call out undocumented students by name. And by the way, and he was calling, this part is not controversial. This is actually established by that article that Milo intended to call for Berkeley to lose their federal funding. Berkeley still said, yep, yep. That's protected. We will allow you to speak no matter what. They will allow someone who was calling for their own defunding to come speak. So already it would be incredible to me if someone argued that Berkeley was not pro-free speech.

0:12:54 Thomas: I mean, clearly their actual staff and the people in charge at Berkeley are incredibly supportive of the First Amendment to a degree that shocks even me, to be honest. I was amazed. So anyway, fast forward to when this is supposed to happen. The talk's supposed to happened. There were large, organized, peaceful protests by students. I think 1,500 students is a number I saw, and that's all fine. And then a small group of black bloc protesters, that's people wearing black gear masks, stuff stuff like that to disguise who they are. And they, they can't, they had the goal of causing damage of violent protest, essentially throwing Molotov cocktails, breaking windows to, uh, and they, we're able to do this by the way, this is by all accounts, a small, a smaller number.

0:13:47 Thomas: It definitely, uh... maybe up to a hundred or so, but dwarfed by the larger peaceful protest. However, small group of people can cause considerable ruckus. And so they did. I mean, it's unfortunate, but they smashed windows. They started fires. They caused something like in the neighborhood of $500,000 in damage to Berkeley and the surrounding area. And as a result of all that violence, Berkeley had to say, the student safety is compromised here. We can't, the venue you at this time and place, we cannot have this, have Milo talk. It's the student safety is compromised. Milo's safety is possibly compromised. And so they were forced to cancel. Now they never disinvited him.

0:14:33 Thomas: No one disinvited anyone. No one said you're not allowed to speak here. No one said that, just so we all know. They had to cancel, it's like if you have an earthquake and you cancel a talk, it doesn't mean that you're against whatever the speaker had to say. That's what it is in this case. There was violent protest to the point where they said, "This is unsafe, we have to stop this." So let me say this unequivocally. I am strongly against these black bloc violent protest tactics. There are apparently people on the far left who support them in certain cases. In cases like this, when a horrible transphobe is coming to speak, they say that that's when you have to take it into your own hands. There's arguments worth looking at, like, certain people have been in control of the conversation station for so long that this is how they take back the conversation.

0:15:21 Thomas: Ultimately, I just am not convinced because while a lot of elements of the argument might be true, the fact is that we have a First Amendment and we can't resort to violence for speech. I just don't think we can. I never think violent tactics are okay when dealing with mere speech issues. But here's the thing. We don't really know. We definitely don't know who these black bloc protesters were. And by all accounts, again, they were dwarfed by the number of peaceful student protesters. So there's a storyline sold by a lot of people that look at these whiny snowflake students. They can't handle a different point of view. They freak out and destroy things and destroy Berkeley. And that's I think that's an overreaction and oversimplification. The fact is that a small number of people can ruin just about anything if there isn't proper security.

0:16:08 Thomas: Security. I mentioned it before, but I spoke to a student after the fact who was actually disappointed the Milo event was canceled, because he and his fellow students were just protesting. They wanted to show their side, their opposition, but they didn't actually even want the event to be canceled. They just wanted to be visible as it was happening. Now, granted, not every student was like that. Obviously, a lot of students wanted it to be canceled specifically. And by the way, this person said at the time that he didn't think the Black Bloc people were students at all. And I tend to agree, but I did see an article saying specifically, I think via Twitter maybe, or there was some evidence that one student joined. That's all I've seen so far. Otherwise, nobody really knows who's who.

0:16:53 Thomas: I would say, you know, there's also the other end where people are saying maybe Milo had something to do with these Black Broc protesters because he benefited from this. His book sales skyrocketed. He was able to paint himself as the victim and all of a sudden his profile goes up at the time. I don't know enough. I'm agnostic on this. I don't think that either is really provable. Maybe it was both like, who knows? Maybe it Was some students, these groups aren't tight knit organized, you know, out in the open kind of groups. They're just, they tend to show up in a disorganized way and cause havoc. So maybe it was, it was both maybe who knows stuff But there seems to be some some sort of, you know, anti-fascist thing going on where people or, and also it's also anarchists.

0:17:40 Thomas: So it's, it could be a couple of different groups. It could be people who are specifically against Milo who are going and destroying stuff. I think that that could have happened. There's also anarchists in general who see a big protest as an opportunity to destroy things and stick it to the man or whatever that. But is, I don't know, I'm against all this, I'm against all of this, it's not hard to be against it. Some people, again, some people on the left aren't, we could debate, but I am, I think that's unacceptable. But let's look at that storyline, snowflake students cancel everything, they, heckler's veto, they get rid of Milo. Nope, the event was canceled, but if Milo had been re-invited, Berkeley would have made the talk happen. Uh, there, he was going to, Milo was going to come back for a while, until we all know what what happened, which I'll touch on later, and the conservative, and I hate to say it, but it is conservative websites sites and news media that makes this argument.

0:18:35 Thomas: Their consensus is students did this. They went nuts, destroyed the campus. Berkeley backed down. No consequences. Well, no, they weren't able to. They're really mad that they weren't able to identify any of the black block people. And the fact is it was night and the police were not prepared for this. They did their best and they weren't able to apprehend or identify any black block people, but this was, it's not as though this was consequence free. These people, and I'll link this, this is under investigation by the FBI. They brought in the FBI to help try to identify this. Berkeley absolutely blames the black block protesters, the school, their position is, these These people ruined this talk and they, I mean, the FBI was brought in to help investigate.

0:19:22 Thomas: I mean, so it's not as though this is consequence-free for these people. Now maybe most of them, if not maybe all of them, might happen to get away with this. But that's not a result of not trying by any stretch. So fast forward to more more recently, because this is all very important to the Ann Coulter story. So this is what happened after these riots, which again caused something like 500,000 in damages around in and around the school. The school had to reconfigure its approach to high profile events, which, yeah, duh, of course it had to. So they were working with their police department, with campus police, with Berkeley police, and they, they to avoid another incident like this, because another incident of a riot damaging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property would be a disaster, so they worked on protocols to handle this kind of thing. A and couple of things they came up with.

0:20:17 Thomas: These, anyone who's going to speak like Milo, for example, who's capable of stirring up this kind of protest, needs to do so and be done by 3 p.m. This is very important so that there's not the cover of nightfall for, once again, black bloc protesters to get away with it. So they've got to be done by 3p.m., and they can only do it in certain halls that they deem are securable and stuff like that. So when the Berkeley College Republicans and the Young Americas Foundation decided to invite Ann and Coulter, the UCPD did an evaluation and they determined there's a high likelihood of violent protests. They even had specific intelligence of people planning this black block violent stuff again.

0:21:02 Thomas: So they told the group, okay, this event needs to be done by three, because, you know, that's a nightfall is absolute hell for trying to police any sort of riots. The talk needs to to be, also the talk needs to be in a venue we can secure, but they also recommended some other stuff that the groups didn't want to do, like, can you not tell everybody exactly when and where it's going to be until like that day, maybe just ways to try to avoid a massive riot because they don't want another right. And the the two groups, though, this wasn't good enough for them. The two, the Young America's Foundation, the Berkeley College Republicans, they couldn't accept it. They insisted on going forward on a day in a place of their choosing. And this is where Berkeley drew the line. This is the only time that I've seen that they canceled the event.

0:21:50 Thomas: Besides when, obviously, when the school was burning down, when Milo's due to speak. But in terms of this Ann Coulter thing, they said, said, okay, if you are going to go forward against our recommendations and against what we've outlined, we're going to cancel this because we're not going to have another riot on our campus. And then because of incredible pressure, by the way, keep this in mind, incredible pressure was put on Berkeley after this. So who has the power here?

Because Berkeley had said, we can't do this on this day in this place, as you said. After a bunch of pressure, they said, OK, fine, we looked for different venues that we haven't used before really, and we found one. It's a little further away, it's about a mile away, but we found it and it's securable, we can have, uh, we'll cover by the way, we'll recover everything, security costs, we will secure it, it will work on the day that you wanted, you do still have to have it end by three, because that's our rules, but other than that, you can do it. If you do it, do the talk there and Culture can come, we'll secure it, everything will be fine. This wasn't good enough for the Young Americans Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans.

I think because the building was too far away in that instance, they didn't like that. So ultimately the school said, okay, here's another date and venue. It's a week later, I think it was. We'll do it then and everything will be fined. We will cover the security. Week later, do it under our rules. This talk can happen. Well, everything will be fine, but the groups, or Ann Coulter might've been in this case, didn't like the fact that students might

0:23:22 Thomas: Not be around that day because it was the week before finals, which they keep referring to as like a dark week where everybody leaves campus, which is weird to me because I went to college and nobody left, like, that I knew of, went to go home during that was kind of interesting. I would stay at school and study, but who knows, maybe I was, maybe I was being square. We, anyway, this date was so unacceptable that Ann Coulter said, nope, here's what we're going to do, I'm still, I'm coming on the day we originally agreed to, I'm going to give a speech no matter what. This idea was so dumb that the Young America's Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans even said, uh, we're not doing this, sorry Ann Culter, I don't, but can't support going on a day that they said they would couldn't cover with security.

0:24:09 Thomas: That's too far. So the groups dropped that. They said, we're not doing that. And that is when Ann Coulter voluntarily pulled out of the talk. Now, she could have spoken at any one of several different days and times that Berkeley offered. Now, that's when Berkeley College Republicans and Young America's Foundation launched their lawsuit that Andrew Torrez, who you all know and love, over on Opening Arguments, episode 65, five, he broke down the lawsuit. In his opinion, the lawsuit is absolutely absurd. Everything Berkeley did fell within reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, which are very common restrictions to free speech. I have the right to do my podcast right now. I don't have the right to go in the middle of a busy street and do my broadcast or in your bedroom.

0:25:00 Thomas: Although if you invite me, maybe I would go podcast from your, no, you can't, you have the rights to free speech, you don't have the right to free speech whenever and wherever you want. So reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. Everything Berkeley did falls well within that, in the opinion of one Andrew Torrez, and it seems reasonable to me. That's the victim narrative that you get, and I think that Ann Coulter did this on purpose for the most part. I'm sure she would have spoken at Berkeley, but I think she was happier to even not bother and just get the notoriety of saying, oh, my speech was restricted. And this is a huge victim narrative. All they had to do was do the talk at a time and place that the police said, okay, we can police this and they would have been fine.

0:25:45 Thomas: And especially when I outlined how willing Berkeley was to have Milo speak, despite the fact that he threatened a student, he threatened the, he was going to call for the defunding of Berkeley and they were like, yep, free speech. Berkeley is in favor of free speech, Berkeley is astonishingly strong in their support of free space. Yes, there are some students at Berkeley and there's some troublemaking black block people that want to ruin things for people. Yes. That is a, that is a legitimate issue, but we need to really put this all in perspective. Perspective So on one hand, I'll grant a bunch of stuff. Like there's some paradigmatic cases here. There's the Miriam Namazi incident at Goldsmith's that I talked about. Gosh, it's probably been a couple of years by now, where she was trying to give a talk to a campus free thought group of some kind, just in a small classroom.

0:26:36 Thomas: And the campus Muslim group interrupted her talk, vocally interrupted her, turned off her projector, did a bunch of stuff, that sort of thing. That's garbage. That shouldn't happen. We can all condemn that kind of behavior. We should all condemn that kind behavior. I know some people on the left disagree with me. Well, I think you're wrong. We can argue about it. And just to throw a few more bones over to this side of the aisle here, uh, the Charles Murray thing, in this was at, at Middlebury, we can talk about this. I still intend to talk about Charles Murray on Sam Harris. It's a big thing to bite off. So I'm going to do that at some point. But disregarding all that, I'll summarize by saying I think Charles Murray is kind of problematic. But disregarding that, even disregarding that, I still think no matter—even if you take the most extreme version of Charles Murray and you say like, oh, well, he's a racist with racist ideology, all that.

0:27:30 Thomas: Even if you were to grant that for the sake of argument, what people did was—I don't support it. Students got up, shouted down. By the way, the person, the faculty member who was going to ask Charles Murray questions at Middlebury said, guys, I have a bunch of challenging questions for him. I'm going to try to challenge what he's saying. Maybe she did. I don't know for sure, but maybe she disagreed with him strongly and wanted to expose his errors in thinking. That would have been a benefit to all of us. But no, they shouted it down. They didn't let it happen. And then even worse, when they went to a backup plan, which was to just do a broadcast out of kind of a private room, then people pulled the fire alarm like three times every few minutes, 15 minutes or so, to shut down the non-essential power and stop the broadcast.

0:28:21 Thomas: Which, to me, I mean, come on, even if you want to say this shouldn't happen at your school, you can't take this off the internet. It's not like you could just go to another place and broadcast from the internet, I, I mean, that, that's, that, that's all too far. I don't support any of that. And I think ultimately someone was, uh, the faculty member was injured in that, which of course is, is terrible. I don't support any of that, that we, we shouldn't support that.

We should do everything we can to convince, I don't know, I guess, college students to not take that kind of action, because I don't think it's right. So throwing all those bones over to that side, there, there is a bit of a problem with, with, with some 18, 19, 20-year-olds who get very upset and don't want to hear certain people talk, and I think that, yeah, that's a problem. Keep in mind the universities, almost every time that I've seen, the universities themselves are on the First Amendment side of this, they're advocating for free speech, they're still trying to make this happen, and there's still a lot of protection there. So I don't think this is some already lost war where there's, there's, it's a, it's a wild west situation on campuses. I think that's exaggerated.

Now, when campuses start losing that, if they do, you know, several years, maybe that'll be a different story, but as we'll see later, the courts may have something to say about that, but what concerns me about this is how many people are leveraging these really relatively minor issues in the grand scheme of things, into a gigantic assault on the left as a whole.

As I've referenced before, you saw Dave Rubin's viral video for Prager University, which is only slightly more credible than Trump University, in my opinion, where Rubin said that defending free speech is becoming a conservative position.

0:30:07 Thomas: Now, okay, even if you you think I am underselling the problem of campus free speech? And that's fine. Maybe you think I'm minimizing too much or something. Okay. We can disagree on that. But it is absurd to say that the right does free speech any better. Just look at a right-wing university and compare. Liberty University doesn't allow students to watch movies or entertainment that is offensive to their their standards and traditions. You're forbidden from having sex outside of a biblically ordained marriage, which I mean, I guess that's maybe that's not exactly free speech, but it's still very important. Teachers are required to be a model of the biblical lifestyle at Liberty University.

0:30:53 Thomas: They don't mess around. They skip right over freedom of speech and go into like thought crime pretty much. I mean that let's go. So, I mean the idea that right-wing universities would do this any better is absurd. I mean, this is not an issue that the left is bad on and the right is good on. You could make an argument that it's about even. I would make the argument that it's a bigger problem on the right. So let's look at more examples. Right now, a woman is facing jail time. This is real. I even asked Andrew. She will likely go to jail for having chuckled during Jeff Sessions confirmation hearing. Jail time for chuckling. Now, Andrew told me she'll be able to appeal and maybe and likely that'll be successful, but she'll be appealing from jail.

0:31:43 Thomas: She will be likely in jail appealing this. So that's a new precedent we have. Chuckling at an idiot in a confirmation hearing is now a jailable offense. I mean, to talk about an assault on free speech. There's another example of a campus group that was trying to get their teacher fired for saying bad things about Trump. So all of a sudden bad things about Trump that now that it's about someone they don't like now, it'S not protected free speech. This is all speaking of Trump. This was all not even mentioning the current person in the highest office in our country. The president, Donald Trump, has been about the biggest threat to free speech there is. In addition to all the stuff threatening journalists, you know, journalistic freedom, all that stuff, wanting to strengthen, I guess, the libel laws, that kind of thing, set us back in the First Amendment.

0:32:37 Thomas: A leaked email showed that he ordered that the FDA have Fox News on all of their monitors. And this is a critical point here because the left has free speech problems, but the left's free speech problems are 19-year-olds being upset that someone invited an old racist to their campus. I mean, really, the right elected as king of their thing of leader of our entire country, someone with absolutely no respect for free speech. And Recently, there was a study from the University of Kansas, this, which I think really puts all this into an interesting perspective. It showed a very strong correlation between being racist and defending racist speech using the free speech argument.

0:33:28 Thomas: Now, you might say, well, maybe those people are just pro free speech. Now, when the same people were shown speech that they didn't agree with, as in, you know, someone being critical of the police or of leaders or something like that, all of a sudden they no longer defended the right to the speech. Now, by no means does this study, or am I saying that anyone defending free speech is racist. That's not what the point of this is. But I think that often is what's happening. I think very often people are hiding behind a free speech defense because they just want certain kinds of speech to be heard that isn't being heard. The best illustration of this, the absolute best, is what happened to Milo himself. After all, what got Milo fired? What finally did it for Milo?

0:34:15 Thomas: What caused him to lose his status as darling of the free speech movement. Speech. That's what did it. He said some stuff. It was stuff about pedophilia and relationships he had with older men and that kind of thing that people didn't like, but it was words. It was just words. But finally, it was the wrong kind of words for the alt-right. Breitbart fired him. Do you know how hard it must be to get fired from Breitbar? You know how it is to be the guy who's That's too far, man. Sorry. We have standards here. We're going to have to let you go. This is not consistent with our virtues. I mean, come on. And by the way, the student groups who wanted Milo to speak were totally fine with trans bigotry.

0:35:02 Thomas: That was fine. Oh, freedom of speech. Oh, you sure? You know, provocateur freedom of speak. They did the exact thing the study shows. When he was just a transphobe, they're like, well, you know, free speech is important. Important. When he ventured into territory, when his words ventured into territory that they finally didn't like, all of a sudden his free speech rights didn't matter in the slightest. No one that I know of, they haven't invited him back. They could again. And if they did, Berkeley would allow him to speak. But people aren't so thrilled with Milo. He lost his book deal. He lossed his job, everything like that. So that's the problem here. It's people utilizing free speech, the like war on free speech narrative narrative to get their odious views heard. That's what I think is really going on.

0:35:49 Thomas: And the worst example, I'm not going to go into it because I've gone into it in depth, and you may hear a forthcoming conversation where I spoke to somebody who supported Jordan B. Peterson. Is Jordan B. Peterson getting on Sam Harris' show and spouting a bunch of transphobic nonsense? And people always, oh, he wasn't transphopic. He wasn't transfobic. That is the the argument I get back when he literally said I could be charged with a hate crime for criticizing someone's choice of fashion. And the fact that he made it about identifying as 15 digit numbers or whatever. I mean, it's just, if you listen to the words he said and you don't hear that he's, that this is coming from a place of transphobia, I don't know what to tell you. I could, we could get into it, but you'll see. I have a conversation with somebody.

0:36:35 Thomas: We'll see how that goes later. But, but that's the biggest disappointment, because Sam Harris, who I look up to, is somebody who was taken in by the attractiveness of this victim narrative. Oh, you and I, free thinkers, we're being threatened. We're victims. We're not being allowed to speak on campuses. It's a victim narrative, and you know what? Victim narratives are really attractive. Everybody loves them. There's a reason. There's reason why Ruben makes up to like $30,000 a month now on Patreon. Patreon, people love being the victim. They love things. Wow, we're under fire here. We, I can't even tweet a misogynistic joke anymore without consequences, you know, stuff like that. I mean, that it's really attractive. I'm, I'm disappointed that Sam Harris kind of fell for it.

0:37:20 Thomas: Uh, it seems like he's been doing that more recently, falling for people who convince him that their views are okay. It's anyway, another story, but that's what we need to be on the lookout for here, people utilizing this to get odious views out there. It's, I, one thing to say, don't punch Richard Spencer. I agree with that. Do not punch Richard Spencer. I, if you're, I should have said this earlier. If your view is to punch Nazis, I disagree with you. Don't do it. Violence is not the answer. I shouldn't even have to say that. But Richard Spencer, I found in my research, is actually a great example of how strong the state of free speech is in our universities. Someone, well, actually a non-student at Auburn University rented a space at the university to have Spencer, Richard Spencer, speak.

0:38:09 Thomas: Again, this person wasn't a student, but apparently they make their facilities available for people to rent. This person rented it to have Richard Spencer speak. The university issued a statement because a lot of people complained. They said, you know what? We don't support this guy. We don'T support Richard Spencer. We find his views odious, but first amendment, just like Berkeley did. Then on the day or around the closer to the day, I guess it was probably something like like a week before, I think, they started having concerns for campus safety. So they canceled the event. They said, this is a threat to student safety. We're canceling it. Now, we can argue about that. Maybe they shouldn't have. I'm willing to hear that argument. However, it doesn't matter because after they canceled it, a judge ordered them to allow it.

0:38:55 Thomas: So the state of free speech in our universities is so strong that if you try to take it away, a judge will order you not to. Like, I think, who's really in jeopardy here? I mean, are we really, are is free speech that much in jeopardy, or should we be more focused on the leader of the free world, or used to be leader of free world? So that's Angela Merkel now. But the, the leader of, the formerly the leader of the free world, who the great, the highest office in the land, who has no regard for free speech. The right is not good at free speech, and the people they put in power are worse than the people the left puts in power, are. All these examples on the left of outrageous PC behavior, they're all students or people on Tumblr. They're not people in power.

0:39:41 Thomas: But want to close, though, by looking at what are people actually concerned about here? Like, what are we worried about when we look at this issue? When we say, when Peter Boghossian tweets what a crisis it is that people in a university are never exposed to right-wing ideas, and then they always say, well, it's so that they can strengthen their own left-wing ideals, which is bullshit. That's not what he means. But anyway, when people people tweet that. What are we afraid of? I think we're, I think we're all afraid of when we see a threat to free speech, when we see somebody maybe that we like who's not allowed to speak, we're afraid that our views won't be heard. We're afraid that the other side of us is going to be too polarized or too closed-minded. They'll never be open to our conversation. And I just want to point out that while this, this is going nuts around college students, like the whole argument is that But college students can't handle this.

0:40:35 Thomas: They're closed-minded. They're going through universities without exposure to right-wing ideas. First off, I would bring up, once again, Liberty University. If you go to a conservative university, you are way more closed off to liberal thought than vice versa. I'll point that out. Also, I want to point out this while I'm at it. It's not as though people at universities are closed off to any sort of right- wing thinking. Like they're not, they'll like in my economics class, we talked about Reaganomics. Like we, we'll talk about right wing issues. We'll talk maybe tax policy or something like that. But the fact is that when Berkeley college Republicans are inviting someone in Milo who attacked a student, that's not, we don't, how worried are you about being open to the ideology of personally attacking a trans student?

0:41:27 Thomas: Like, is that is that a major threat to your intellectual development that you won't get exposed to Milo Yiannopoulos? That's absurd. Campus campuses have right wing people who aren't complete troll assholes like, you know, Milo and Coulter. They have right wind people all the time who express right wing ideas. That's not it's not a problem, really. That I think the nail in the coffin for me was a study done at Brown University, which showed that despite the fact that we all think the internet is polarizing us, the internet, social media is polarizing, it's siloing us, it is doing all that. This study found that the groups that are most polarized, that score highest on this polarization test, which again is what we are all concerned about.

0:42:13 Thomas: I think when we talk about free speech, we're worried, like we want the other side to hear us. We want a spread of ideas. When, when, when Boghossian is tweeting about college students, he's worried that they're becoming too liberal, too polarized, too siloed and isolated. This study showed that overwhelmingly the people who are the most polarized are in their seventies, not people who are frequent internet users or people at colleges, people in their 70s. They're the most polarized. So that's, I mean, that's what we have to be worried about. We got to be afraid. We've got to worry about, you know, we've got to be, we got to, we're going to be worry about when we talk about the threat to freedom of ideas, Breitbart and Fox news are the biggest threat to an exchange of ideas. They are propaganda machines who are causing elderly people to have, I have to say just insane world worldviews.

0:43:04 Thomas: I mean just just views of facts that are garbage, that are total nonsense. Is the biggest threat currently to freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas. Is in my mind. And it elected Donald Trump. So that's how big of a threat it is. It was able to elect the president of the United States. College, 18, 19, 20 year olds were not able to do so. They don't even vote. That's really. So there you have it. That is my take. I think, I hope you'll find it nuanced. I hope You'll find It fair. And again, I'm all for policing the left from the left. These crybaby college students, they do drive me a little nuts too. I mean, allow someone to speak, but put it all in perspective. Let's not lose our heads. So there you have it. This is kind of my magnum opus on the whole free speech issue.

0:43:53 Thomas: I finally put it all together in a lot of ways. And I'm curious what you think. I'm going to skip voicemail for this week because I'm doing this episode early. So maybe next week we'll have an extra long voicemail segment. Maybe there'll be comments from this show as well. Well, got I to thank my new patrons this week, and they are Chris Utzig, Levi Claussen, Horacio Tovar, Lucas Stewart, Chris Utzig, looks like pledged again, okay, whatever, two times, maybe third time's a charm, Chris, and Scholar Mom pledged. I got to say, Scholar mom's a hottie. It's my wife, Lydia. My wife finally started, by the way, very qualified, a master's in psychology. I haven't had a chance to really talk about her much on the show, but she just started what's going to be a peer review kind of based, a research-based mom blog.

0:44:44 Thomas: And that's really cool because there's a lot of pseudoscience bullshit in mom blogs. So she's just really good at looking at research, digging through tons and tons of sources, finding interesting stuff. So if you want to visit scholarmom.com, check it out. That's my wife's blog. I'm really proud of her. I think it's going to be excellent going forward, and I'm excited. So there you go. Thanks, Scholar Mom, for that pledge. I pledged back. We're pledging each other. We, you know, that's what we do. I also, I'm going to thank top patrons, but I want to take a moment to say that what we said over on Opening Arguments this week is true. Here was offered a sponsor for two episodes, which is actually normally they just ask for one, but it's going to be two. I investigated that sponsor and I turned up some disturbing reviews about that sponsor, that they sold people's data, that they harassed with phone calls.

0:45:37 Thomas: And so I turned that sponsor down. I turned that money down because my credibility with you guys is more important than some sponsorship money. I just want to let you know if you happen to be in a time or place where you could support the show on patreon.com/seriouspod, where you will always get ad free content no matter what. I just wanted to let, you know, that now is a good time, especially because I think it was because of tax time. Maybe a lot of people, I got messages from people having hardships who had to cancel their pledges, no hard feelings. I do appreciate the messages, though, because oftentimes I'll feel like, well, what did I say? What did I do? But I do appreciate the message. Understand times are tough. Totally get it. Hey, if it just so happens the times aren't tough for you, now's a good time. Patreon.com slash SeriousPod. Support the show so that it can continue to happen because, as you guys know, it's my only living child on the way.

0:46:29 Thomas: So, but anyway, thank you guys so much. Much, I appreciate your support so much. Lots of cool stuff coming for patrons. You got a hold of that conversation I referenced where I talked to a Jordan B. Peterson supporter, sort of loosely. You'll see. But anyway, you got access to that early week, early at least. There's a little extra bonus conversation I did as well with another listener that you're going to get access to. Lots of good stuff over there on patreon.com slash series pod. I'd like to thank my top all-time great patrons and they are: Estate Hunter, Ash and Kaylee Riser, thank you guys so much for supporting the show. That's all I've got for you. Go to scholarmom.com, check out, uh, keep sharing that video I made that, uh, thanks for everybody who did the video of the fake Republican ad. That was fun. Maybe I'll be able to keep doing that in the future. We'll see how it goes. And thanks for listening, and I'll see you guys next week.