Transcripts For CSPAN2 P. E. Moskowitz The Case Against Free Speech 20240714

Broadcast schedule. Because it is being broadcast will be broadcast, its important that we silence our cell phones. If you wouldnt mind making sure that were really blur in the recording if you dont do that. Silence the cells. Questions and answers, basically the format will be will start off with a brief hesitation, have a brief questionandanswer between our guests then you all be invited to participate. Well pass around this microphone. If you want to ask a question, if you just wait until this microphone is in front of your face so it gets recorded and we dont have a big blank spot. Lastly, if you need to use the restroom during the filming, there is a restroom at here. If you could try not to walk in front of the camera that is ideal. You can squeeze around back that way if you need to. Thats about it. Cool. All right. Welcome everybody. Thank you all so much for coming up to me. Were extremely excited to have p. E. Moskowitz discussing his new book the case against free speech and joining p e will be george ciccariellomaher. He will have a brief conversation venture over to you guys for some questions and answers. P. E. Moskowitz is a author of how to to kill a city, a former staff writer for aljazeera america. Different for publications including the guarding, New York Times, new yorker. Com, the republic, wired them slick, as the temp splinter and vice. A graduate of hampshire college, a livein new orleans. Joining p. E. Is going to be george ciccariellomaher who is a visiting scholar at hachette institute of performance and politics, having cut privacy at drexel university, simply state prison and the venezuela, venezuelan school of planning in caracas. He is coeditor of Duke University press series radical americas and author of three books, we create shabbos, building the commune, and decolonizing dialectics. Please join me in welcoming p. E. And george. [applause] im incredibly glad to be with you all to a lunch and help present p. E. Moskowitz and his book the case against free speech. My pleasure being harassed some aspect of first of course is p. E. Is a wonderful friend, comrade but also because they are one of the most acute observers of our contemporary condition. Writing about the cuts right to the heart of things that many of us have been grappling with for the past few years. This book is the book that people need to read to think through what is happened since 2016, what is happening 2017, 2018, if we if we think about the emergence, proliferation of a powerful and mainstream White Supremacist Movement rally around the presidency of trauma and also essential for reading in 2019, 2020 and thinking about how to fight back, pushback on this emerging and resurgent fascism and had to break it all to my. And so this book is a chocolate thinking about the past. It is a historical analysis and also tool for thinking about what we need to do in the future. I should say that im doubly glad to be here having a conversation about this book because its something that has impacted me on a very personal level. I was a professor once, and came into the crosshairs of the far right in late 2016. 2016. In other words, precisely the moment when the wind was in the sales of the altright, when you are making ambitious claims to political power in the streets but also in the white house, when they had steve bannon as their most steadfast ally in the halls of power, and in which they sought for reasons that p. E. Should very well in this book to target universities in particular for the wrath. When that happens, in the aftermath of being targeted with death threats, thousands of death threats, emails, voice mails as well as administrative measures, i always maintained that what happened to me was not a question of free speech. This is concrete the case again for reasons that in the chapter on the socalled freespeech crisis at middlebury crisis, p. E. Shows well which is speaking at private universities is quite simply not a question of free speech. Its the course of things like Academic Freedom, a complex concept but also question of what it is that we understand to be the role of speech in our society. Many depending on the grounds of free speech. For that i was thankful at the time. Many thin on the times of Academic Freedom even if is not absolute values either. As p. E. Shows again in this chapter on middlebury which is about invitation of charles royko the white supremacist eugenicist pseudoscientists to speak at this prestigious liberal arts college. It was not many things. Its about the years of anxiety, suffering, discrimination suffered by students of color at middlebury in the run up to this event is with the idea of giving a pseudoscientists, eugenicist, his ideas have been thoroughly discredited by even the Scientific Community a platform on the campus to be introduced by faculty come to be introduced by the president of the college. It was not our entire structure of power. And this is what p. E. Does so well. In my case what it always wanted to drive home Company Think when you think of if we are thinking about cases like john eric williams, everything that cases like tommy cooper on naming of you dont know the top faculty who been threatened, harassed, many cases disciplined by the university for engaging in speech but from the First Amendment is no defense. Four oh they claim to speech doesnt answer the difficult question. What this is about is about the materiality of speech. Moskowitz in the very first chapter on charlottesville gets right to the point of this. Maybe exaggerating your naivete. You say i shouldve charlottesville and i thought it would be about free speech and realized when a car struck a body and a person was left killed by what supremacist that this was a very material question. And this is what it is. Before target universities its about the materiality of again something with which is charted very well in this book the inroads made on the far right into universities with dark money, with rightwing foundations. Charles murray when he wrote ae bell curve, eugenics text, that for some reason to celebrate nt only by the right but by the clintons, by the right wing of the democratic party, wrote that book entirely funded by rightwing institution money. It was not an academic book. Its not an academic argument. The question is, whatsapp happened universities on one hand on the basis of his funny that is infiltrated universities . What possibilities does this close off . What students will be criminalized if they stand up and protest . Against the Charles Murrays of the world, against richard spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos of the world. Students that are using of course their speech engaging in rowdy speech, conflicted speech. How do we draw these lines between what is acceptable and what is in question how do we draw lines between what is platforming, in other words, elevating someone to and invited paid platform, and how is it we engage in these questions . But these are fundamentally major questions. Battle in terms of consequence, the material consequences are clear. The Material Impact of what white supremacist speech is a violent spirit we know the purpose of will. Just as the imperial impact of donald trump and the white house is violet and an uptick in white supremacist, arm Training Camps for nazis and fascism in the Pacific Northwest of forces that need to be physically defeated. Its also material in thinking about how these questions emerged. And thinking and diagnosing in a way that this book does powerfully, how it is that liberalism itself is part of the problem. How it is liberalism fetishize is a certain kind of speech, looks away from it, ignores the material construction of White Supremacist Movements, organizations, power. Of course fails to defeated at the polls and leads us in a situation of throwing up our hands i like the aclu defending the right of the claim, defending the rights of nazis to speak, to organize, to continue to physically threaten people of color across the country, on campuses at all campuses. This is this is a book of your o read. I hope there are enough copies of it or because people really a sweetie. You must dig through it. Its a historical account, a contemporary account. It weaves together the history of union organizing, the history of the aclu. Its movement from heavily communist organization that took seriously material reality to one that fetishize is on some level freespeech as the First Amendment above all other things, and it cuts right to the heart of what we need to be thinking about today. And with that, please join in welcoming again p. E. Moskowitz. [applause] thanks, all. So yes, i think we should like in the talk went to because i forgot george is a much better speaker that i am. [laughing] no, so yeah, i mean a b i can talk a little bit about what i wanted to write this book, and to be honest, it was confusing to me. I did would know what i wanted to write when it first started writing it, except i was kind of angry at i was seeing relayed to freespeech. My first book was gentrification, and as writing this book i kept thinking how could i i jump topic so much, e they are not related, right . Then i realized they can came out of the same desire to go deeper than what we are currently present in our world, whether its through the media, academia. Both gentrification and freespeech were given these platitudes, these ways of thinking that turn out to be more propaganda than they are true, internet to be based on these materials, the narratives were given to be based on material histories that influence all of our thinking and prevent us from making change in the world. I want to go beyond the headlines, another cliche, go beyond them and actually find out what freespeech actually means, if anything, i find a wife evelyn seems to be so angry about it right now. 31 from the far right to liberals and some on the left, too. So in order to do that i did a few things. I obvious he did a bunch of research, read the surprisingly little philosophy there is on freespeech, you know, given that something that we think is like the most important thing in this country, oftentimes there are very few critical books written about the concept of free speech or even the legal history of the First Amendment. I wanted to dig into that and analyze it, and then im a a reporter. Thats what i do, as i cant write without reporting. I ended up going to a bunch of flashpoints over free speech in the last few years. I was in charlottesville. I went to Middlebury College where as george mentioned Charles Murray was invited to speak. I went to Evergreen College in oregon and read college, and went to talk to protesters and to Standing Rock and talk to people who would been arrested and put in prison for protesting there. Yeah, i guess to put it bluntly what i found out is free speech means pretty much nothing at all. We think of free speech as this value that we uphold that no matter what our politics are beyond freespeech, that it is the think we can agree on, the classic quote that doesnt actually come from anyone but people district to voltaire. I disagree with what you say but also to my death i will defend your right to say. Thats what 95 of americans think. But as it turns out, thats a lot more complicated, and speech doesnt really mean speech in a society where some are so much more able to speak, and equally as importantly be heard sense of many of the people. What i found is that speech, like Everything Else in this country, falls along the predictable lines of race, class, gender, and every other form of oppression, and that most people really have no significant right to free speech. And i would argue also no significant right to liberatory freedom. The First Amendment in particular but the whole discourse of freespeech, it allows us to allies socially start and scary facts, that we live in a super racist, sexist, classless country. I think this is why people are so attracted to it from the right and liberals is because its much easier to fall back on this concept of freespeech in the supposedly universal is values that is to contend with what is actually happening in this country. And i think College Campuses are a really good place to talk about that. Part of me didnt want to spend too much time on College Campuses in this book because i think that there kind of over focus on in the media because college kids are easy targets and you can kind of like look at them from afar. But i think College Campuses are how we understand freespeech in this country a lot of the times, especially the Mainstream Media has harped on them so much in the last few years. But when you actually go to these campuses, what you find is that the students are not simply protesting, lets say Charles Murray or do not protesting the thing and everything was about this that absence, a day at present when he voluntarily asked white students to leave campus so that students of color could discuss things amongst themselves for a day. And it wasnt, it is not just about that. Thats not what the controversy is about. The word freespeech almost never gets uttered in those conversations. What students are really talking about our lifeanddeath issues of race, gender, of Sexual Assault on campus, of feeling like theyre completely unseen, unheard, feeling like their campuses are hostile environments and that theyre not actually learning the things that will be useful for them in their lives. What ends up happening when you apply freespeech discourse to that is completely erases all of that. I think thats why, again, why we are attracted to it. So, thats for a specific reason. We think of freespeech the way we do because of a specific history of how its been turned into this propaganda tool. It didnt just happen by accident, and freespeech asthma think of it today was not always the same. Obviously, back when the First Amendment was passed, slavery was still the old, black people couldnt go, women couldnt vote. So right there is a a hypocrisn the kind of founding of the supposedly free speech in this country, right . But then all throughout u. S. History we see freespeech being trampled on, especially for people, people of color and leftists in general. Its really only until the 1970s, 1980s and onward that we start to get this very come in my mind, peculiar version of freespeech that means were wt allowed to argue with someone when they speak if it are lets say a campus speaker, or that if we protest someone or use violence to protect ourselves against nazis, that we are somehow becoming a fascist. That its an interesting because people just think this is obvious, this is a free speech has always worked, its a universal value. But it wasnt until the 70s, 80s, 90s until that particular a peculiar definition came into play. Not to blame everything on the Koch Brothers, but its their fault. [laughing] if you go back to the 70s, and they can under the link to my book about justification, basically gentrification, under nixon and then reagan the indices were completely deregulated, tax rates were slashed on the wealthiest americans, and in the case of gentrification that allowed them to kind of push for this horrible real estate grab the lead to gentrification. In the case of freespeech they had a lot of money to do whatever the hell they wanted with, and they came up with a plan. So the Koch Brothers main political advisor at the time, he was their political advisor for 30 years up until 2015. He put together this plan the said if you just tell americans we want lower taxes or deregulation around environmental issues, obviously no one will go for that, right, because those are terrible things and they dont benefit many people. So instead you have to come up with a rhetoric that is more universal, more kind of soothing to your average american. This is where freespeech discourse came into play. Think actually wrote down this theory, actually wrote down the strategy of investing in the Raw Materials of ideas, i. E. Line professorships, buying entire colleges or schools within universities. To quote one conservative from back then, funding grants, grants, and more grants for books, books, and more books. Once they figure out is what you invest in those Raw Materials, you end up kind of generating a discourse that is hard to argue with because, for 20 years youve been creating a scholarship that you can fall back on that no one is aware really exists, and till its, until were in our present moment and what is yelling at each other about free speech. Once this funding stream started, literally hundreds of campus groups were created by the money of the Koch Brothers, the devos family, betsy devos, current secretary of education, and a few other billionaires. And they created hundreds of schools, i think there 313 schools within universities backed by the Koch Brothers currently, and they did the grants, grants and more grants for books, books, and more books. You can see when this funding starts to the pc crisis of the early 1990s. If you go back to the 19 90s, early 19 90s, late 1980s, all these books are coming from people like Dinesh Dsouza or other kind of far right provocateurs. Not only claiming that market freedom, i. E. The freedom of billionaires to do whatever they want is the ultimate freedom, but also claiming that students, liberals and the left and everyone else who disagrees with that is antifreespeech and profascism. And i think 1990 you get the closing of the american mind, a book that claimed College Students were essentially the new fascist and they didnt want anyone on the campus who disagreed with them. You get a liberal education by Dinesh Dsouza and the budget of the books, and its not surprising, the Mainstream Media ate all that effort newsweek had a cover story about the new fascists. Thats what they call them, on College Campuses. The New York Times did several stories and reviewed a book glowingly. And new york magazine, the new republic, many other places jt agreed with all of this supposedly like new works of scholarship that were directly funded by these billionaires. I think that they were essentially living with the consequences of that conservative revolution essentially, where they convinced the american public. They convinced schools. They convinced students through funding to adhere to this very particular definition of what freespeech is, where if you disagree with a conservative or dont want them to speak, that is a violation of free speech and even if you are not the government. You can see that many of the same organizations now fun people like Milo Yiannopoulos and ann coulter and all those other terrible people, and essentially just keep pushing that strategy, where they find a controversial book. They find a controversial campus tour. Student protests because they dont want these terrible races transsoviet people on their campuses. That makes the conservatives latch onto that and then use it as an example of how they are oppressed and have left is really fascist. I think the saddest part to me is that many liberals have had the wool pulled over their eyes as that happens. They see this as a true intellectual debate thats about freespeech and our fundamental rights, and the dont see this as a purposeful strategy to essentially infiltrate College Campuses in American Society at large with these thoughts and beliefs and policies. I just feel like ive talked for a long time. I dont know if theres any questions you might have for anything you might want to add to that. I feel like ive been super glowing with regard to the book already, but another thing that needs to be drawn out is the fact you witness spoke to a lot of them spoke to a lot of different people in a lot of different context on a lot of different subjects. You spoke to a young organizer at san antonio who supported, came to the United States at two years of age and was deported at 18 because they were an organizer with, would abolish ice, the prime organizer. It was through social media speech and it was through political speech in public that this young organizer was deported to mexico. You spoke to and dealt with questions surrounding the neonazi march which was targeted at the juice population of skokie, and in the 70s. As an interesting moment where you expressed a kind of almost a sympathy for the Jewish Defense league, which is this right wing direct action jewish group, but which was willing to break some nazi schools. Skulls. Were there, im sure that momt in particular was, it seemed very fraught for you but with of the moments in the course of speaking with people, interviews, doing this research that really struck you or make you think about things in a different way . I mean, i think that is probably one of the biggest moments for me. If people dont know, skokie is still a count in illinois outside at chicago, but its most often associate with this march that actually never happened in skokie. A local neonazi group, you know, tried essentially march in skokie. Skokie was majority jewish. Many people there were Holocaust Survivors. Everyone basically said, hell no. But because there are supposedly was about freespeech, government officials kept trying to figure out a way to weasel again or keep them, let them come in, but you know, have to require insurance so they couldnt afford or whatever. What ended up happening was, for the first time the aclu defended the nazis which is not a strategy to continue today, on the grounds that by not allowing nazis to march to a town full of Holocaust Survivors who were essentially denying their free speech, and so that was a reay big Tipping Point for the aclu. But also would happen is that the Jewish Defense league, i cant stress enough a a really reprehensible, racist group, nonetheless was semieffective at, as you said, bashing nazi heads. If you ask them, and many people of skokie, they are the reason, and not only them but of the people not in that group who got the guns, kind of armed up like people to just live in skokie, and threaten the nazis with violence if they ever came. So reporting on that was interesting to me because it kind of showed how far our debate has shifted. If you look at the news clippings from back then, everyone almost was kind of on the side of the skokie residence and almost no no news on the site of the nazis. People were willing like normal people not activist, just jews in the homes were willing to take up arms to fight against them. You fast forward to now, and what does every newspaper article say . What does every oped say, what does every planets mtv . Basically there defending nazis for marching through the streets even if it leads to violence like it did in charlottesville and has dozens of the times in this country. I think that shows once again that purposeful conservative strategy of how we frame freespeech today. The distinction between speech and action is absolutely untenable. We like to think there is a distinction between speech and action but every single day we are reminded that the two that theres no way to keep them apart. And for me one of the striking reminders of the present is the el paso massacre which is direct evidence, if we needed more evidence, many of us have been saying this for years, direct evidence that the narrative not only of the white house but white supremacist organizations, the narrative of thesocalled great replacement which thinks that white people are being replaced by people of color, by low birth rates , the idea that this is detachable and separable from violence is unsustainable when people are going into Christchurch New Zealand and massacring, when people are going to el paso and massacring people they perceived to be mexican on the basis of these ideas and when we see its happening over and over again. Its been happening for years. There is certainly an uptick but theres been this approach by mainstream liberals that say we have to defend speech on the one hand and act as if its not causing this violence. Charlottesville was almost this weird turning point, especially when trump had people on both sides. For a moment the media seemed to want to say no, theres a real distinction that needs to be marked out and then they retreated onthat and now i feel likemaybe el paso, maybe the confluence of el paso and the synagogue shooting and recent events have begun to createsome kind of concern. Are you optimistic that people will begin to interrogate the question speech the way you have . Know. Kind of. I think one of the really infuriating things to me is that people obviously always confused the First Amendment and whoit applies to. Congress creating no laws to impinge your speech says nothing about faced or 8chan or reddit and i was disheartened to see that it took the christchurch shooters, the el paso shooter and a bunch of other shooters all were using 8chan to organize and get themselves up and it was only after the last shooting that 8chan was like, maybe this is bad and that the people, the company that supports 8chan stopped supporting it, the people who hosted, all the web services thatmake it run. And their grounds before the last shooting is that this is a free speech issue when it clearly is not because they are private entities, theycan do whatever they want. I guess im hopeful in the sense that that has changed a little bit, that people are more willing to take that stand and say this cant happen on our platform i think were just still so convinced that we have a responsibility to some of the most vilepeople in our society to give them a platform whenever they want. And i feel like there was Something Else i was going to say to that. Oh yeah. Charlottesville was a perfect example of how that line to speech and action is completely untenable, always changing, always political, always being influenced by people with power. I interview people who posted rap lyrics on facebook that supposedly threatened their exwives and one of them was jailed for five years because that crossed the line between speech and action but not to names of cars ramming into protesters that say black lives flatter is not crossing the line between speech and actions i dont have a clear sense of what should be speech and action i dont think anyone does but its telling to look at where that line stands, who is allowed to be on the speech side and who gets put on the action side of it. For example the j 20 protesters being near a broken window and the inauguration test was enough to put you on the action side of that line between speech and action whereas old ak47 at charlottesville and wearing nazi insignias all over your shirt was not enough to putyou over the line between speech and action. That line is always political and i think we need to recognize that if were going to claim respeech and free expressionfor the left. And another thing, one of the things i was most heartened to find in the book is that free speech kind of used to be a leftist concept. Back in the 1920s and earlier than that facebook and like 1900s the 1940s, the aclu was a pretty very proleftist, prounion and not openly communist but ledby a bunch of communists. And they even defended a union worker blew up or not blew up but bombed the Los Angeles Times which was the most variably antiunion paper at the time. Whatever you think of that, the aclu defended those people in court and that shows you how radical an organization they were and what was interesting to me about speech back then in the eyes of the left was that they acknowledged that there was no line between speech and action. Their definitionof speech was , it has to mean something in reality for it to be a good thing. If you can Say Something but it doesnt get you anywhere, if you can put for class revolution or better wages but you cant realize those desires, and speech means absolutely nothing and i like that definition of speech because if you seek, if that speech falls ondeaf ears, what is the point of speech. So that was probably the most hardened i was in the book to see how leftists had captured the meaning of the First Amendment showed me that eventually we probably could take it out of the hands of the far right and the liberal media establishment. Thank you for that. Before too long i want to open it up to the audience for some questions that people may have beenholding onto this whole time. A reminder that the questions should go into the microphone so that those recording are able to capture them and we can continue with the discussion. Very much to both of you. I just want to say that im a little concerned. I think theres a general acknowledgment of the failure of policing in charlottesville. But, and im not completely clear but im a little concerned at what, you seem to imply which is that private citizens should have pitched battles in the streets. According to their political views. And that doesnt really seem to be a good outcome. Gangs fighting each other on both sides. And i also was glad that you went back to the 20s and 30s and so forth because it isnt just the left that has made you, made use of free speech although the use its made of free speech since the 20th century is important so you have the Supreme Court deciding early in the century that very gradually but extending dissonance of world war i on the basis of free speech and then in the 30s, the labor Unions Movement organizing depending enormously on the First Amendment and that made possible unions and all kinds of strikes and protests and so forth and then dont forget the Civil Rights Movement where the freedom riders and protests, all of those thingsdepended on the First Amendment which the courts recognized. Those are all enormous contributions of the First Amendment to progressive causes in the United States. So the fact that the right has decided that they can make use of the First Amendment does not in any way misshapen the power of the left to do so as well. And you also seem to be in some ways not really rejecting the distinction between speech and action so much as not liking the inconsistency of its application which is a very differentkind of solution. So thats what i want to say. I think those are very good points and thank you for them. Just in terms of the policing thing, i think its up to every individualto decide what they will and wont do. But i dont think the police are an adequate way to kind of prevent violence on the streets considering there so often the ones that cause it and that in charlottesville and so many other nazi marches they were found to be organizing with the far right, with nazis, protecting them at all costs, arresting leftists. The history in the police in the us is a history of arresting black people, other people of color, anyone who wants to foment change thats good for people in the United States so i dont think that, whatever you think of direct action on the streets, i dont think that relying on the police is an adequate way to work out an issue of disagreement within the United States is there not a neutral party, they are on the side offascist governments. Right here. So following directly up on that, the distinction between speech and action has come up, is a central part of the analytic way, then i guess the question is how do we make sense of the fact that what the Supreme Court is primarily being concerned with in a wide range of cases is they always bring it back to the First Amendment immediately. So what do you make of that and then moreover, to the history of your thing about what do you think the left should do about that . I think that goes to a larger problem of the structure of the us government. Thats kind of ridiculous to me that we refer back to this hundredyearolddocument to decide all our lives , especially when that document legalized slavery and many other terrible things. So the kind of reverence for this very old document made by many terrible people doesnt make any sense to me to startwith. That being said, im not antiFirst Amendment necessarily. I think the spirit of the First Amendment is a 91 but i think that, you know how people believein western Democratic Capitalism , every other western capitalist country has gone along side without a First Amendment. And in my view probably has a little bit less of a restrictive environment when it comes to free speech then this country does so again, i think the i dont know if its the purpose but the effect of the First Amendment has more to do its power as a propaganda tool and it does to actually change laws or provide justice in this country. And to your last question about what leftists should do, i dont want to speak for the entire left. Thats something we have to decide whether we want to reclaimits power as a propaganda tool. As people did in the early 1900s and as the aclu was so fond of doing then. Or just kind of disregarded and say free speech doesnt exist and its bs and move that way so i dont have the answer to that but i think it can be either reclaimed or done away with. You have any thoughts . Im agreeing in the sense that one of the dangers of embracing it is this question of how is it youre going to embrace it. The liberal media at embraces it but in an uncritical wayin a way that has nothing to do with the First Amendment. That applies as you put in a blanket way acrosssociety. When you push even academic writers whohave written books on Academic Freedom and its relation to free speech , dont admit it only applies to action but its the broader principle. And then theres this lead to the idea that broader principle has beenthe guiding thread of us history which is absolutely absurd. Its been in the service of and structured by powerful interests, materially, racially and otherwise and in the course of reclaiming it begs the question of how we reclaim it and i think what youre suggesting is in looking back to what unions do is to say you reclaim it as a material some and say our speech has to matter, to point out the fact that when were talking about these mainstream questions of Milo Yiannopoulous on student campus the question is invariably about black students or almost homosexual students were threatened by Milo Yiannopoulous and what about their speech, their willingness to stand up against Charles Murray and read off their statements in reply to his pseudoscience so how is it that we negotiate these questions . Even if you think of supposed freespeech issues as an important issue, i think its very telling that weve been convinced that this is such an important freespeech issue and that theres virtually no discourse or media about the prison population being a freespeech issue, isnt the fact that tens of millions of americans are locked up in camps of freespeech issue . Doesnt the fact that migrants are being disappeared and their families cant find them, isnt that a bigger freespeech issue and Charles Murray talking on campus . So i think that shows how cute our perspective has become and if we did want to, yes, if we did want to reach for freespeech it would be in that material way that is tied to reality. Do we have more questions . Dovetailing on that last point, maybe somebody will be aspects of discourse do have some substance in empirical evidence that helps us get to the point of which we can maybe decide what does affect material speech and what is of value because at the end of the day thats what were talking about. One of the ways in which the media has mishandled for example the Climate Change debate may help us to understand that a little better, because you know, somebody in the minority comes as a denier, the Mainstream Media as a platform for about half hour with the host as the only other counterbalance thats supposed to be maybe if one person representing that side of the argument should be there, the evidence indicates it should be 99 other people on the other side lending appropriate weight. So if somebody wants to come on campus and effect that kind of discourse, it should be met appropriately and only in that context, not as a standalone bully pulpit. I definitely agree and thats something middle very students in particular pointed out. Middle very would never invite a climate denier to their campus goes against their academic values of giving students truth, said that they would never invite a climate denier, never invite someone who denies evolutionary science so why are they inviting someone who believes in iq based on race . Thats an equally debunked scientific theory and their point was that obviously makes it not a freespeech issue because your closing the doors to people who dont believe in climate science, it just shows that you still think that the debate is out on race science, thats how they framed. And i think thats a good point. It doesnt have much to do with freespeech, it has more to do with evil and power whether its the media or administrators being scared not to get those powerful interests their attention because there are consequences to that. If youre a media organization, you can lose advertisers. If youre a College Administrator you dont want to be evergreen or middleberry which have had problems withadmissions now and getting enough students is of all these protests. There are real material consequences to for whats right and it has less to do with freespeech and more to do with those people being scared of the consequences. And there are very real material consequences for public universities. Like the uc system to deny Milo Yiannopoulous a platform and administrators were scared because the First Amendment on some level does apply and the question of the platforming on publiccampuses is a more complex one. The administration is more scared for sure and for a legitimate reason because theyre funded publicly and they have bills to pay, have to pay 10 billion to go there but colleges are some of the most restrictive speech environments on the planet. To start out with. The admissions process is that a freespeech violation is charging people 50,000 a year to speak onyour campus a freespeech violation . Is hiring someprofessors over others of freespeech violation . Because youre valuing something over other things, its putting a book on your syllabus and not another book of freespeech violation mark its frankly , i know im being recorded so ill say malarkey. Its just ridiculous. There super restrictive so the idea that because theyre not allowing one person with a really abhorrent point of view to speak , that theyre violating freespeech, if you want to view it that way but you have to consider them to be the largest crisis of freespeech in the world ever because theyre restricting speech so much tobegin with. More questions. There was a movie that came out in 1980 that bring these issues to mind. The movie was called cruising, how pacino was in it. It was about a serial killer in the gay bars of newyork. Very graphic. He would go into the bars, bring men home and viciously kill them. They found it in our neighborhood. I was in new york at the time and they wanted to film in thegay bars. The community decided to disrupt the filming of that community, that movie. We had glitter on the roof and they throw it and the light would catch it and they have to stop filming. A huge debate, artistic expression, the freedom to make a movie versus our community recognizing this as amaterial threat. And it was a moment and im looking back on that and was curious how you read that now. I think thats awesome that you did that. I agree with that activism against something that felt materially threatening to the community. I think we see the same things happening today, dana schultz is the name of the artist who painted a painting of like a dead black person and put it in the, he put in the whitney museum. And there were protests over that because people were saying this is really affecting to have a white artist representing this in such a voyeuristic way. And the museum insisted on keeping it up because freespeech, even though again, its a museum, a zone of freespeech, obviously not literally, it has people who are curating what goes on there every moment so i think the same debate continues but i didnt know about that activism and i think thats awesome. More questions. If there are no more questions, please join me in thanking mister moscowitz. Get the book, have it signed and please thank our author. And george will be signing his book up there. [applause]. [inaudible] tonight at nine eastern on after words, in his latest book sentinel incorporated journalist ben westhoff reports on how labs in china manufacture the drug. Hes interviewed by democratic congresswoman and custer, founding cochair of the Bipartisan Opioid Task force. In all if youre assigned to a university, you publish your paper and it went into some university library, pretty obscure,hardtofind. But in the internet age, all of these papers were published online. And publicly available around the world. Exactly, so these rogue chemists began looking for these files specifically for the papers to go through them and appropriate the chemical formulas to learn how to make these new drums. And 10 Eastern Oregon democratic senator jeff merkley provides his firsthand account of migrant families at the southern border in his bookamerica is better than this. Advocates had hundreds of boys who were being warehoused in a walmart. So i went to find out about it and they didnt want me to see what was going on and they called the police and the video went viral and suddenly all of america who was hearing about cages and secret warehousing of migrant children. Watch book tv every weekend on cspan2. In Charleston South Carolina Jennifer Ross reporting on the 2015 Emmanuel Church shooting and its aftermath. Portion of the program. After the shooting the Coroners Office staff was taking salvageable items found on the victims bodyand in the fellowship hall. One woman had found and claimed a purse. She was gratefulfor the womans effort but what felicia wanted back was her bible. You dont want it, the woman had cautioned. Yes i do want it. We dont think you want it. You can keep everything, felicia said , i want my bible. At bible however had been tossed in the trash, thrown away with other things that seemed too damaged to return to thevictims families. With Police Lieutenant Jenny Antonio caught wind of the conversation she didnt dismiss felicias request as impossible. A catholic she understood what the bible meant to the grieving motherand she had been working with the national fbi Rapid Response team that flew into Police Agencies and victim advocates handled mass casualty events. The teams members and dealt with tragedies at places like sandy hook and brought with them critical Lessons Learned including many of the devastated parents and wanted their childrens personal effects like backpacks and drawings no matter how damaged. The fbi team and discovered a Texas Company that could salvage even the most bloodsoaked items. So five days after the shooting, antonio had called an fbi counterpart and soon drove to the first of two storage buildings that housed biohazard that cleaning crews at emmanuel had thrown away. There they hauled out several big plastic bins that contained the life and death of nine people. In suffocating heat, with gloved hands, antonio rummaged through sticky papers that clung to what looked like a dark brownish red sheet. She had appeared beneath it. And there sat a darkleather bound bible soaked in blood. A bullet had pierced its pages. She opened the cover and then pried apart two of the pages. Stuck between them, a little torn off piece of what might have been a receipt for a name. Felicia sanders. Antonio had carefully wrapped it up and sent it to the company in texas. Two months later a box appeared in her mail. Antonio soon drove down the winding road to lisas home and knocked on the sanders front door. Alicia greetedher. Though her eyes were fogged with grief, alicia managed to smile and welcome. Antonio summoned the tremendous effort it took to greet the endless stream of people waiting to talk with her for the investigation, Community Members who wanted to know her, a large turtles of family and friends stopped by to visit. She decided to make it quick. As i walked inside antonio about the box. Felicia took it from her, she opened it gently, tugging the tissue paper inside. There sat her black bible that she called her basic instructions before leaving earth. She opened the front cover. A pinkish hue now tented the gossamer paper inside. A tear barely visible now marked where a bullet had pierced the pages. Yet despite a gunshot, the blood and the cleansing,gods words still stared back at her in clear and bold black letters. God it was still with her. So felicia brought this bible to her sentencing hearing and she held it up as she took the pages of it and she sprayed them at him. And she said something to the effect of i have forgiven you but nobody can help you until you help yourself. And i thought it was so interesting she brought it with her as if to show him the defiance no matter what had happened, it was now hers and i thought it was a special moment and the fact that this police attendant would do that. To watch the rest of Jennifer Hodges talk, visit our website at booktv. Org and search for her name or the title of her book, grace will lead us homeusing the search box at the top of the page. Heres whats coming up on book tv. Next its an author conversation on outlaws in American History on the recent mississippi book festival. Then Harvard University professor duncan white looks at how cold war propaganda was disseminated through literature in the United States, written britain and the soviet union and later from a callin segment at this Years National book festival, elaine weiss recalls the Womens Suffrage Movement and the radicalization of the 19th amendment. Find a complete schedule of whats airing on book tv by consulting your program guide. Good morning everyone. Welcome to the book festival