Behind the Bastards - The Fake Crusade for Free Speech
Episode Date: July 9, 2019In Episode 72, Robert is joined by Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston to discus Free Speech Grifters. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for... privacy information.
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What's exposing my... Oh no, no, no. I gotta stop myself on that one. Sophie's not here.
Cody and Katie are, and I am ashamed that I even tried that one.
In my defense, we were talking about chat roulette.
We were. The whole context of that joke makes it better.
Because then you just let it fly real quick.
But we will not be informing the listeners of the context.
By a will inform them that my co-host today are Katie Stoll, Cody Johnson.
Some news, and even more news.
Some more of it, even more of it.
Network.com Integer.
Yeah, we were really creative when we thought of these names.
Yes, we are all creative geniuses.
Well, if you have a show and you're like, I'm gonna do that, but more of it.
Humble also. Humble, creative geniuses. Humble, sexy, creative geniuses.
Humble, sexy, unstoppable, creative geniuses.
Unstoppable, yeah. Powerful.
You should probably add a second humble in there too.
I mean, what we really are is news grifters.
But today we're talking about a less ethical kind of grifter.
Free speech grifters.
Yes.
But free speech is important.
It is. And also, this is behind the bastards, the podcast.
We're talking about the worst people in all of history.
And forget to announce things because I'm hanging out with my buds and not doing my job.
No, we're not doing work.
Again, Sophie is not here, which is why I have a podcasting machete.
He really does.
Sophie does not let me bring my 18-inch long machete, but I have it.
They let you fly with it?
It is in your hand.
Oh yeah, you can fly with machetes. You can fly with guns before it's easy.
You all know he's gesturing with it.
And when he said, oh yeah, you can fly with machetes, he pointed it right at me.
Well, you're a good two, three feet away.
It's true.
I don't feel threatened.
I need this paper.
Yeah, it's gesturing. It's a tool.
I wouldn't describe it as wildly brandishing your machete.
No, no, no, because I have not started drinking.
Exactly.
When I will be drinking is when we do our election year podcast.
And then I will be drunkenly gesturing with machete, perhaps at CPAC?
Maybe definitely at CPAC.
Maybe definitely at CPAC.
You get your machete.
I got my lanyard.
We're going to have a time.
And I've got my phone to record it all.
Yep.
We can name the video Machaniard.
Well, we should probably get into content that will be enjoyable for people who aren't
the three of us.
If you're not interested in the Machaniard podcast, then okay.
How are you guys doing?
I didn't ask you that on this.
Thank you.
We've been talking for hours already.
That's true.
Yeah.
Good.
We're more well.
Cool.
All right.
Well, I'm going to get into this.
Now, I'm not focused around a person, which is my norm, but focused around some people.
And I think folks will find it interesting.
Plural bastards.
Bastards.
Over the last few years, particularly since 2016, the cause of free speech has become
one of the most vicious and blood-soaked battlegrounds in our national culture war.
It's a unique one, too, because while most of America's political kerfuffles revolve
around issues like abortion or gun rights, where there really is little common ground,
free speech is a thing that everyone, at least in theory, supports.
Yeah.
That's nice.
I would say, yeah.
Big fan.
Big fan.
Love speaking freely.
Big fan, yeah.
Big fan.
Love shouting freely.
Big fan over here with her shouting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Big fan loves to shout.
Big fan, BF.
Now, in August 3rd, 2018, famous tabloid The New York Post published an article titled
How Liberals Turned Against Free Speech.
It opens with this line.
Why is it considered liberal to compel others to say or fund things they don't believe?
That's a question raised by three Supreme Court decisions this year, and it's a puzzling
development for those of us old enough to remember when liberals championed free speech,
even advocacy of sedition, and conservatives wanted government to restrain or limit it.
So that's the opening of the article.
And the three cases were, two of them were one California case overturning a statute
that required anti-abortion pregnancy centers to inform clients of where they could obtain
abortions, and the reversal of a 41-year-old precedent which stated that public employees
didn't have to pay union fees to cover the cost of collective bargaining.
And the third was one of those stupid fucking cases about a Christian bakery not wanting
to make it for gay people.
Classic.
At least one a year.
All of these stories confuse me as to how that abortion thing, what about that free
speech?
Like, not informing.
Anyway, continue.
That's a great question, Katie.
That's a great question.
I'm going to dig into that one a little bit more specific.
But I do want to note that the post-article quotes Neil Ferguson, who argues that liberals
are increasingly authoritarian, and it ends on this line.
Like the liberal Supreme Court justices who see no constitutional problem with compelling
crisis pregnancy centers to send messages they find repugnant or acquiring union members
to subsidize political speech they disagree with, or forcing people to participate in
ceremonies prohibited by their religion, they seem not to have noticed Yale law professor
Stephen Carter's observation that every law is violent because behind every exercise of
law stands the sheriff, Carter calls for a degree of humility in passing and enforcing
laws that compel speech against conscience, something today's liberals seem to have forgotten.
Liberals is in quotation marks.
Oh, yeah.
You got to get those scare quotes.
Yeah.
You got to get those fucking square quotes in.
Yeah, so it's easy to see.
I can see how someone might be convinced by that line of reasoning.
Like if someone believes abortion is wrong and they open a clinic to help pregnant women
in crisis, it's good to help pregnant women in crisis.
And people who think abortion is wrong shouldn't be required to push people towards abortion
doctors.
That's an argument you could make, and it's an argument that if you have exactly that
much evidence available to you, there's logic to it.
Yeah, yeah.
On the surface.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Now, when you read a little bit more into these centers, it becomes easier to see the
authoritarian liberal argument as to why that maybe doesn't include all of the relevant
facts.
Let's quote from a report by the AMA, famed liberal lobbying group, All of the Doctors.
Drive down any highway in America and you might see a sign, Pregnant Scared, called
1-800-5, you know, phone number.
Most often these signs are advertisements for crisis pregnancy centers, CPCs.
CPCs, sometimes known as pregnancy resource centers, pregnancy care centers, pregnancy
support centers, or simply pregnancy centers, are organizations that seek to intercept women
with unintended or crisis pregnancies who might be considering abortion.
And then a little further down, it notes, CPCs, as a rule, not only discourage abortion,
but also refuse to provide referrals to abortion clinics, although they often provide counseling
about dangers associated with premarital sexual activity.
Women who visit CPCs typically do not realize that they are not in an abortion clinic and
are surprised to find that abortion is not considered an option at these centers.
As obstetrician gynecologists, we have had several disgruntled patients come to us who
were disappointed and felt deceived by the care that they had received at CPCs.
So, you see, it's not quite as simple as these do-gooders being forced to speak against
their will.
It's somebody dressing up a religious mission as a medical.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Cool.
Cool.
So, if you're pregnant and you go there and you feel like you're in crisis and you're
pregnant, one of their solutions is to teach about the dangers of premarital sex.
Premarital sex?
Yeah.
Is that effective?
It's failed.
Well, it's kind of like if you go into the doctor with lung cancer after a life of smoking,
the doctors will say, will you try not fucking smoking?
You know, smoking's bad for you.
Yeah.
Let me know.
The cigarettes aren't good for you.
Let me put on this film strip real quick about how smoking is bad.
Not doing you no favors.
I love doctors that are helpful.
There's a lollipop on your way.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know that specific story bugs me.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
That's why that's the one I chose to focus on, because it frustrated me, too.
So yes, if you read into it a little bit, it becomes clear that despite how it was framed
by The New York Post, this is not a pro or anti-free speech argument.
Instead, it's an argument over whether or not religious organizations should be allowed
to masquerade fraudulently as medical practitioners and lie about healthcare options, which is
maybe a little different than free speech.
Seems a little different.
Yeah.
Seems like not quite the free speech.
Yeah.
Just as many maybe.
Mumble, mumble.
Mumble, mumble.
Yeah.
Now, the fight over Christ's pregnancy counseling centers is emblematic of the broader debate
over free speech currently consuming our national discourse.
Take a serious political issue that has nothing to do with the First Amendment.
Wrap it in that cloak and tar the other side for being anti-free speech, so they have to
defend themselves on that front rather than actually debate you over the harms of what
you're doing.
Mm-hmm.
It's a cool strategy.
Clever.
Yeah.
Smart.
Works.
It's like if you're hunting a deer, instead of camouflaging yourself, you dress yourself
up as another deer, but with a gun for a mouth.
Oh, yeah.
This may not, in fact, be an analogy.
It's perfect.
Then you got to argue with that gun-mouthed deer, right?
Instead of, well, you're clearly you're a hunter and you're not a gun-mouthed deer,
but now I'm, I want to debate that gun-mouthed deer.
Well, and you know that old chestnut of country wisdom?
Nobody ever wins a debate with a gun-mouthed deer.
Well, you can't because as soon as he tries to talk, a bullet shoots out of his mouth.
Exactly.
Exactly.
That's a good argument from the gun-mouthed deer.
Thank you for embracing my, I still don't think it's an analogy.
Your perfect analogy?
My perfect analogy.
I've definitely lost the thread, but I'm on board.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Also, just full disclosure.
I mix up analogies and similes.
Oh, yeah.
Me too.
Mm-hmm.
Metaphors, all of it.
Metaphors.
Oh, my God.
Participals.
Dangling.
Those aren't related at all.
No.
No, they're not.
But it makes me uncomfortable to think about things dangling.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Particularly, participles.
Yeah.
The free speech grift, as it's been coined by some critics, has risen to become the centerpiece
of right-wing politics because it is so much easier than actually arguing the merits of
aggressive policies on abortion, racial justice, or anything else.
It is a brilliant strategy because it allows them to co-op the support of a sizable number
of moderates and liberals who are either too dumb to see what's happening or who are
eager to capitalize on the grift themselves.
In fact, the origins of our modern free speech grift trace back to a 2015 article in The
Atlantic titled, The Coddling of the American Mind.
Yes, yes, yes, I love these.
Yeah.
You're almost touching your nipples, Cody.
Yeah, I'm very excited.
Yeah.
Now, the article written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haight, or the article is written
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haight, and the thrust of it is that political correctness
has completely overtaken American campuses, ushering in a terrifying new era where art
is censored and languages destroyed to please howling hordes of liberal zombies.
God.
I, they're so obsessed with these college campuses.
They are.
Yes.
Big fans of college campuses.
You know how college, this is where you learn and you do some dumb stuff, and maybe you
make things out to be more than they are, and then you sort of grow out of it, and then
you go into the world.
Yeah, maybe you put cocaine up your butt a couple of times.
Maybe.
You realize that's not good, and then you go into the world and you snort cocaine like
an adult.
My point is.
That's how it's done.
That's how it's done.
This is the one problem facing America today.
Yes.
That's what I was getting at.
College campuses.
College campuses, yeah.
And PC culture.
And PC culture.
You know, let's not try to be courteous and empathetic to other people.
Let's not try to listen to other people in their perspectives.
No.
Let's just fuck them.
Because it's violence to me if you say that kind of made me feel bad.
Yeah.
That's it.
I'm deeply offended.
Whoa.
Whoa.
God, I offended you.
I'm going to quote from the article.
For example, some students have called for warnings that Chinua Achebe's Things Fall
Apart describes racial violence and that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby portrays
misogyny and physical abuse so that students who have been previously victimized by racism
or domestic violence can choose to avoid these works, which they believe might trigger a recurrence
of past trauma.
Some recent campus actions border on the surreal.
In April at Brandeis University, the Asian American Student Association sought to raise
awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an
academic hall.
The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as, aren't you supposed to be good at
math and I'm colorblind, I don't see race, but a backlash arose among other Asian American
students who felt that the display itself was a microaggression.
The association removed the installation and its president wrote an email to the entire
student body apologizing to anyone who was triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.
So that's what they're complaining about, the coddling of the American mind.
That one small story has changed my mind about this issue.
That's what they do in the articles, they pick out a couple of stories where it's pretty
easy to say, okay, yeah, that's a group of people maybe behaving in a way that I would
consider a little bit unreasonable or at least the way that it's characterized makes
it seems like they might be a little unreasonable, but it's not interestingly enough for logic
ration people like the folks who tend to be on this grift.
It doesn't delve much into actual statistics to tell us maybe if this is a problem or not.
I wonder if that information is available.
It is.
And you have it right here?
I do have it right here, courtesy of I didn't do the research myself being a hack in a fraud,
but I did find the research done by the Niscannon Center, a nonpartisan think tank dedicated
to fostering an open society.
They collected data from a number of studies on the beliefs of the I generation, aka Generation
Z, aka the kids who are in high school and college currently.
And it turns out these kids are less likely to strongly favor free speech bands than any
other age group.
So actually kids in college right now are the least likely to support any restrictions
on freedom of speech.
Interesting.
Quote.
A decade of data from the Knight Foundation on high school students tells a similar story.
Support for the First Amendment is currently at its strongest level yet recorded, with
a majority of high schoolers 56% disagreeing with the statement, the First Amendment goes
too far in the rights it protects.
Note that there is no change during the years when IGN would be entering high school.
And contrary to Haight's theory about the relationship between social media and free
speech, the Knight Foundation survey also found that high schoolers who actively engage
with news on social media discussing stories, posting comments and linking to articles consistently
demonstrate greater support for free speech.
Not less.
Interesting.
So maybe taking isolated incidents that are sort of like charged with emotion.
Yeah.
Of the thousands and thousands of campuses in the country and hundreds of thousands
of students.
And then pinpointing and saying like, this is a nationwide problem.
This is every college.
This is all of them.
Maybe that's not scientific.
Yeah.
Maybe it's complete nonsense.
Maybe it's intellectually dim.
Yeah.
Maybe it's just lying.
Can we say lying on a podcast?
I think we can.
Well, you can bleep it.
We can bleep it.
But I'm going to make a bleeping noise by hitting this empty LaCroix can with a machete.
And we can just, we can put that in a post.
This is a good idea.
Don't worry.
It's fine.
Can we, we'll post that.
Great.
Everybody good?
It's the best bleep I've ever heard.
Thank you.
Okay.
And now you've got a place to put your knife.
I know.
It's a nice little machete holder.
Yeah.
I made a little pocket for it.
Everything works out.
Yeah.
I like that about the world.
Now, the Niskanen Center summary also notes that in a later article, Haight and another
writer cite that 2017 Knight Foundation study that was just quoted above to make the same
point, noting a rise in the number of college students who say the climate on my campus
prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive.
The rise is from 54% in 2016 to 61% in 2017.
But Haight and his co-author neglect to mention that 2016 and 2017 are the only years for
which data on that question is available, making it essentially meaningless as a way
to identify a trend.
They also insinuate that this increase in censorship is driven by liberal and leftist
students.
However, quote, this increase is being driven by perceptions of self-censorship among Democrats
and independents.
The number of Republican students who reported a sensorious climate on campus actually dropped
from 62% to 53%.
That's wild.
Cool.
You love to laugh.
You love intellectual honesty.
This is wholly unsurprising.
I don't think I've seen this data you're referring to.
I saw a similar report about this.
There's actually quite a lot of data on it.
There's a lot of data.
Yeah.
And basically, yeah, saying the same thing that the perception is actually the opposite
of reality.
Yeah.
And you can see this kind of generally throughout history of a lot of the left gets censored.
People who actually want society to change in massive fundamental ways often censor themselves.
Right.
Yeah.
And even just professors, like left-ling professors get censored a lot more than any
of these people.
We'll get into that.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
Now, that Niskanen study does also note that, according to a 2017 YouGov study, conservative
students were more likely to report censoring themselves in the classroom, 60% versus 53%,
and outside of it, 47% versus 40%.
But even this data does not tell the entire story.
A survey conducted by Cato and YouGov notes that 58% of Americans nationwide report self-censoring
their views among other people.
Conservative college students are actually less likely to report censoring themselves
than conservative Americans outside of colleges, and liberals on college campuses censor themselves
more often than liberals in the general population.
So, sorry, are you suggesting that it's the opposite again?
Yeah, maybe a little bit the opposite.
Okay.
I'm just clarifying.
I'm just clarifying.
Thank you for the clarity is important.
Again, wholly unsurprising.
Yeah.
So, in other words, the entire story of free speech suppression on American college campuses
is a lie.
The reality is literally the opposite.
Yet, in spite of this, right-wing groups like Turning Point USA, Cody's favorite, my favorite
fellows, have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence political elections
on college campuses and crusade against safe spaces at their campus clash events.
Their 2019 tour includes speakers like TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr., Candace
Owens, and Kyle Kashov, who recently got his Harvard invitation rescinded for writing racial
slurs and several text messages to classmates in an open Google Doc.
Cool.
Are you suggesting that the president's son is being censored?
Oh, yeah.
That poor guy never gets to speak.
I'm just saying that the president's son has a free speech problem.
It must suck to be the president's son and to be so rich.
It's a shame when millionaires funded by billionaires just say lies and pretend like they're-
Yeah, and someone gets angry at them.
And that is the death of free speech.
Someone getting angry at a millionaire being paid by billionaires to lie, lying.
That censorship.
That censorship.
Criticism of censorship.
It's oppression, guys.
Call it what it is.
That free speech bastion TPUSA donors include such luminaries as Greg Gianforte, who insulted
a Guardian journalist for asking him questions.
I didn't know Greg was involved with TPUSA.
Oh, he sure is.
He's giving them thousands and thousands of dollars.
Of course he is.
Free speech warrior.
That makes only the most sense.
The guy who assaulted a journalist.
For asking a question.
Mm-hmm.
You guys want to hear an unrelated quote from Thomas Jefferson?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
We're left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers
without a government.
I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
Interesting.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it goes well with those gestures.
Products.
Services also.
And services.
Yes, you were right, Katie.
You nailed it.
I was so excited to get one right.
You did.
You got it.
You nailed it.
I won.
Would you like to throw in a free ad for something?
This is your time.
This is your time in here.
Well, right now I'm craving gummy bears, so I'd like to throw in an ad for gummy bears.
The concept of gummy bears.
Yeah.
You know, I'd like to be hopping it all around the forest.
Fantastic.
Filled with juicy flavors.
Oh, juicy flavors.
Gummy bears filled with juicy flavors.
I love eating candy.
I find it in the forest.
Yeah, forest candy.
Forest candy.
It's the best kind of candy.
Well, also, it's when you wanted the most.
Like, I imagine you're hungry in the forest, and you're not sure when you're going to have
another snack.
Need a little sugar rush.
Need a little sugar rush.
I was out camping with some friends years back in Texas in the summer, and we had a
big bag of gummy candy, and we left it outside, and it all melted together into one giant,
like, four-pound ball of food so good we just pour it in our nose.
Yeah, slice it up.
Yeah.
Cut it off.
Beautiful.
Oh, fucking so tasty.
All the flavors in one.
Well, if you want all the flavors in one, buy the products advertised.
What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told
you, hey, let's start a coup?
Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.
I'm Ben Bullitt.
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I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.
For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.
And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to
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From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup.
Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you
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I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.
What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the
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And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.
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This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the
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Welcome to the Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your
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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based
on actual science?
The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful
lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.
The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.
Two death sentences in a life without parole.
My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.
I'm Molly Herman.
Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't
a match and when there's no science in CSI.
How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all
bogus.
It's all made up.
Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your
podcasts.
We're back after a flawless ad pivot.
Really thank you, Katie.
Oh, you know what?
You're welcome.
You're so much better at this than me.
I'm so good at this.
You are.
Nailed it.
You're so good.
Humbly good.
Yeah, so Turning Point USA doesn't just sponsor speeches and debates on college campuses to
foster free speech.
They also compile and maintain a professor watch list, which is definitely a thing that
sounds good for free speech as a watch list of professors.
Yeah.
Typical of the list is the entry for professor Betsy Stevenson, quote, Betsy Stevenson is
an associate professor of economics at the University of Michigan.
Stevenson made the list after making the claim that the lack of women found in economics
textbooks is the reason so few women pursue economics as a major.
In a study she conducted with Hannah Zlatnick, she found that 77% of people found in the
leading economics textbooks were male.
That sounds like a reason to be on a watch list.
Fire that woman.
Fire her.
Fire that woman for her research in speech.
Unbelievable.
Fire her.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's...
Now, maybe it's a watch list of good researchers doing cool stuff.
That's true.
Yeah.
Maybe I should read the next paragraph.
Maybe you should.
Maybe I should.
I can't agree with you more.
When the watch list was originally created in November of 2016, TPUSA writer Matt Lamb
described its purpose thusly.
We aimed to post professors who have records of targeting students for their viewpoints,
forcing students to adopt a certain perspective and or abuse or harm students in any way for
standing up for their beliefs.
Ah, okay then.
You want to read your example again from earlier?
My God.
Well, she... Sensitive little dweeb.
She claimed that women were unrepresented in economics textbooks and then proved it with
rigorous data.
Well, that's threatening all the male students that are future students there.
I'm a hurt now.
I feel attacked and I think you should apologize to us both, Katie.
Because I'm a woman?
Exactly.
I refuse.
Wow.
I'm even more offended.
I think I know a watch list you're going to.
I...
I've always wanted to be on a watch list.
I feel the need now to join Turning Point USA, which incidentally has a history of higher
races and then having to fire them.
Yes, it does.
I feel the need to go up to Greg Gianforte, ask him a question, and get hit in the face.
Well, that's what you're describing.
I'll leave that to you.
I'll get on a watch list.
Freedom of speech.
We can all do different parts of it, yeah.
We're all just different free speeches.
Cool.
Lettness Canon study also looked into the frequency with which college faculty members
are fired due to criticism from the left and the right.
The results are fascinating, and I'd like to quote from that study again.
To begin to answer this question, I gathered together all cases from 2015 to 2017 involving
a number one, a faculty member at an American degree granting post-secondary non-profit institution
who was fired, slash resigned as part of a settlement, or demoted denied promotion due
to speech that perceived by critics as political.
Okay, seems reasonable.
What remains are 45 cases from 2015 to 2017 where a faculty member was fired, resigned,
or demoted denied promotion due to speech deemed by critics as political.
Of these, more than half, 26 occurred in 2017, the clear majority, 19 being over liberal
speech.
This disparity persists even after removing terminations occurring in private religious
institutions.
For liberals, the most common types of speech to result in termination were those perceived
by critics as anti-white or anti-Christian.
For conservatives, they were anti-minority or anti-diversity.
Now, because their diligence canon notes that the higher frequency of professors being
canned for left-wing speech may have more to do with the fact that there are more left-wing
professors than right-wing professors, that is absolutely a factor.
So, well...
Because they're educated.
Because they're educated.
Let's not be mean with our facts.
Facts, our facts do care about their feelings.
Okay.
I got a D on my history paper because I'm conservative.
That's why.
My history paper was just, why was Hitler the bad guy?
He shouted at the people I shout at.
I wrote a whole thing about how Civil War was only about states' rights and they gave
me a D and I was like, what?
Is it because I voted Republican?
It's censorship.
I agree.
It's censorship because as far as I'm aware, there was never any slavery in the South.
I learned that from my sheltered upbringing, I guess.
Well, my history textbook went from the founding of humanity to 1491 and then started right
back up again in 1989.
Exactly.
You get all the key parts, yeah.
Skip the nonsense.
Skip all that bullshit.
Get right back into the good stuff, right into the roaring 80s.
So yeah, while there's no evidence that conservative voices are being silenced in academia, this
data does not necessarily suggest that the opposite is happening.
However, quote, the size of the disparity in 2017 bears watching as it may mark the beginning
of a trend in precarious liberal speech.
A proper assessment would also need to take stock of the data categorization issues surrounding
religious institutions' determinations for political speech are especially difficult
to capture.
So like actual researchers who care about facts, even when they have a lot of data,
the Niskanen people hesitate to draw conclusions that are overly broad based on the information
they have because they're trying to do actual research as opposed to picking out a single
issue on a single campus and saying, look at what these liberals are doing to free speech.
Well now I don't know what to think.
Now you don't know.
You seem like two equally credible people.
Yeah.
I mean, on the one hand, whatever dumb shit you said, on the other hand, this report.
Yeah.
What are you going to do?
What are you going to do?
Join TPUSA.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, while we're on the subject of professors, we should probably talk a little bit about
Cody's favorite professor.
Oh, you know, he always gets his name, Dr. Jordan fucking Peters.
Yeah, there he is.
I love your air horns.
I was waiting because as soon as he said Professor Washless, I'm like, you know who?
Here it comes.
Here it comes.
Yeah.
It was the only person to talk to about after this.
Yeah.
Now, Dr. Professor Peterson describes himself.
Jordan Balthazar Petersen.
Fuckin' Balthazar?
Jordan Balthazar.
It is not.
Jordan Balthazar.
He describes himself as, quote, a classic British liberal who defends individual freedom
from collectivists.
Now he has a particular hatred for the Ontario Institute for the Studies of Education.
The organization's mission statement seems mild enough, which is, you know, a little
bit confusing.
It says that its goal was to prepare scholars, teachers, and other professional leaders to
be equipped with the skills and global awareness required by an increasingly challenging and
complex society, ready to influence policy and practice in their fields.
But Petersen takes issue with what I suspect is that last line, claiming the OISE is basically
a training ground for dastardly social justice warriors.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
In a 2017 interview with Epic Times, he stated, the Ontario Institute for the Studies of
Education, that bloody thing is a fifth column.
The people who are producing the educators that emerge from that institute, they should
be put on trial for treason, like it's serious stuff.
The idea is that the purpose of education is to get them while they're young in kindergarten,
so that this radical, post-modern Marxist ideology can be so thoroughly inculcated when
they're young, they have no chance of escaping from it.
And that's what's happening in the education system.
This paranoid maniac.
They need to be tried for treason?
Yeah.
Robert was reading that.
Be precise in your speech.
Cody takes office glasses and like puts his head in his hands, just so everyone has the
visual.
I have a, you know how, you know, when you play like an Xbox and you play in a video
game, and they've got all these different like little awards you can win for doing,
shooting people in the head or whatever.
My one for this podcast is going to be giving Cody an embolism.
It's getting there.
God.
That quote.
Yeah.
Oh, it's his entire self in one sentence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
These people are teaching things I don't like.
They should be on trial for treason.
Tries for treason.
I love free speech.
This is like, and oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I have feelings.
Additionally, back in 2017, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that Dr. Professor Jordan
Peterson planned to build a website listing university courses in Canada that had what
he claimed were postmodern neo-Marxist course content.
He told CTV, we're going to start with a website in the next month and a half that will be
designed to help students and parents identify postmodern content and courses so that they
can avoid them.
Yeah.
Cool.
Now, this created a bit of an uproar according to the website Inside Higher Education, quote,
in a YouTube video posted to his personal account, he highlighted English literature,
anthropology, sociology, women's studies, and ethnic studies as the types of courses
that, quote, that have to go.
Professors at the University of Toronto expressed concern that they would be targeted by such
a list, which also led to fears of harassment.
Instructors of the potentially targeted courses believe that their autonomy as educators may
be under threat.
The proposed website has created a climate of fear and intimidation.
The University of Toronto Faculty Association said in a statement to Canadian media.
Now, shortly thereafter, free speech warrior Dr. Professor Jordan Peterson, Professor
Doctor, announced on Twitter that he had shelved for now his plans to build a website listing
courses he thought should be banned, like women's studies.
Oh, good.
I, yeah.
Geez.
I was about to ask you.
You did say women's studies, right?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Who would need to study women?
You did say anthropology, right?
Yes.
Also, sociology.
Oh, my God.
So, ethnic studies.
Geez.
Also, English literature.
English literature.
Be banned?
It doesn't.
The fact that...
They don't, should, not should be banned.
Have to go.
Have to go.
Okay.
Let's not say banned.
That would be the wrong word, banned.
Have to go.
Have to go.
Well, sounds like he's being censored for his plan.
And we should be taking him seriously.
Famous censored millionaire, Dr. Professor Jordan Peterson.
God.
Who only eats meat.
Who only eats meat.
Only eats beef and salt.
And his poops, I'm sure, are fascinating.
Unbelievable.
Jordan.
They are unbelievable poops.
Yeah, they're unfathomable poops he's got.
This is the man who had literal apocalyptic dreams about the end of the world and wanted
to start a church and believes that his wife has prophetic dreams if he is the special
boy who's going to save the world from destabilization and destruction.
I'm not making this up.
No.
In a different era, this man, while he is scary, would be a worldwide threat of some
sort.
Sounds a little, I don't want to say hitlery, but that's what I was going at.
Dreams of you saving the world from a destabilizing, one could say cultural Marxism.
He might have a different word for it.
Save your syndrome type thing.
Because there's a natural, there's a natural order.
I think we need to spell out really directly why you and I see Nazi parallels and some
of what's going on because it is a little bit obscured.
I had actually an argument with this about my dad recently because he doesn't understand
like the, when people talk about cultural Marxism, which is a big thing for Jordan
Beeson.
Yeah, that's what he's saying.
He said it before.
What's the exact wording he used?
He says postmodern Neo-Marxism.
Postmodern Neo-Marxism.
He talks about how they switched it and stuff like that, but there are other clips of him
talking about literally cultural Marxism and stuff like that.
He clearly used one term and then switched to another term.
The idea of cultural Marxism comes from fucking Nazi propaganda in the 20s and 30s when they
called it culture, Bolshevism or something like that.
And the idea was both that Marxism was infiltrating society and specifically that it was infiltrating
society through the Jews that we're trying to undermine.
This is why we see when we make snide comments about Dr. Jordan Peterson being kind of a
fascist.
We're not reaching super far.
There was this ideology that was this attitude of cultural Marxism that it's a thing that
exists that was created by the Nazis to justify what they did to the Jews.
And then a new generation of people has just sort of cut the Jews out of.
They cut the Judeo out of Judeo-Bolshevism, but they're like, no, there's still cultural
Bolshevism.
Yes.
It's now like the liberal academia and the left, the radical leftists and their cultural
like it's an amalgam of these groups that are doing this instead of just the Jews.
And the line is very clear and it's one of those things where you're like, no, Jordan
Peterson isn't a Nazi.
He would have been.
He would have been.
Yeah.
And so there's that, but even beyond that, someone that says that, oh, my wife had a
prophetic dream that I am this savior type person or someone that says, you know what?
Yeah.
Only eating meat.
That'll cure depression.
And I want to open a church.
I want to open a church.
We need to ban women's studies, ethnic studies that is anthropology, which is just like that's
absolutely nuts.
So that's somebody that's a maniac.
I don't know how else you describe it.
And if you get into power, this person gets into a power.
It's terrifying.
Yeah.
You don't want to, I don't want to oversell the state of the threat, but if Dr. Jordan
Peterson gets his way, we will lose the best season of community.
Are we really willing to?
No.
Absolutely not.
We fucking aren't.
No.
No.
No.
It's a good show.
It's a great show.
They ended on a high note.
Really?
Yeah.
That was actually really good.
Except Donald Glover's gone, but.
Yeah.
It was sad.
That was sad, but they really did a good job.
Now you got.
Oh, yeah.
No, both of the actors they brought in for the 60s.
Yeah.
Writing is perfect.
It's good.
Really?
Yeah.
Nice note.
Cheers me up a little bit every time.
Yeah.
Okay.
This is where we got well off of track here.
Now, let's talk about free speech warrior Dr. Jordan Peterson, who is a big fan of free
speech.
Big fan of free speech.
They've got to go.
Clearly.
Clearly.
Huge lover of free speech.
In June of 2019, the doctor professor was invited to speak at the Brain Bar in Budapest
by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Mr. Orban wanted to speak with a doctor professor about current political issues, according
to New York magazine, quote, the Orban friendly news outlet Hungry Today described their meeting
as an amiable conversation about the dangers of illegal immigration, political correctness,
and Jean-Claude Junker's apologies for Karl Marx.
Peterson and Orban also touched on a current tendency to minimize the crimes committed
under communist regimes.
They cited an infamous speech by European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker in
which they said he defended Karl Marx.
Now, if you lean a little bit more towards the conservative end of the spectrum and you
have not kept a pace with Hungarian politics, you may not immediately see what's so fucked
up about this.
Viktor Orban is an avowed advocate of what he calls illiberal democracy, aka not really
democracy at all.
Illiberal.
Illiberal.
In his 2018 acceptance speech, he declared an into the era of liberal democracy.
We have replaced a shipwrecked liberal democracy with a 21st century Christian democracy, which
guarantees people's freedom, security.
It supports the traditional family model of one man and one woman, keeps anti-Semitism
at bay, and gives a chance for growth.
Free speech lover Viktor Orban.
Now after his election, he passed a series of punitive laws and launched a propaganda
campaign that forced the Central European University to withdraw from his country.
New York Magazine describes them as, a liberal institution whose avowed purpose was to protect
the open society from authoritarianism of the right or left.
They also note that, at the nation's remaining colleges, Orban has banned fields of study
that conflict with the state's conception of truth.
And while Orban identifies as a liberal Democrat, his party has insulated its power against
the threat of popular rebuke to such a degree that many scholars describe his regime as
a creeping dictatorship.
Now in a 2018 interview, Dr. Peterson himself agreed that Hungary's assaults on academic
freedom were unacceptable.
Yet he agreed to sit down with Orban and have a convivial talk about the danger of cultural
Marxism.
Meanwhile, Peterson decried the idea that people ought to accept different gender pronouns
for trans and non-binary people as being dangerously in line with, quote, the Marxist
doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.
What?
What?
Dr. Professor Jordan Peterson there.
Expert on the world.
It's so interesting to hear him talk about this stuff.
And it's like, one of those things is like, you don't hear him talk about the other side
of this or the people that die from the extension of sort of what he espouses.
You don't.
It's just interesting.
It's only communism has killed people.
He doesn't feel compelled to talk about that.
It's his right.
It's his right.
As a free speech warrior.
As a free speech warrior.
Point of order.
Jordan B. Peterson, who's a clinical psychologist, Dr. Professor Jordan B. Peterson, a clinical
psychologist, has on more than one occasion on camera claimed to be an evolutionary biologist
and a neuroscientist, two things he is not, two things that a respectable, say, professor
or doctor wouldn't claim to be if they were not.
It seems like perhaps he's- Addled.
Dishonest.
Dishonest.
Okay.
That might be possible.
Also he's once asked if he supported gay marriage, the cultural Marxists are supporting,
and he's like, well, if cultural Marxists support it, I wouldn't support it.
So.
Oh, cool.
Very cool.
That's a solid intellectual line to take.
Now, earlier in this episode, when we started talking about the good doctor, I noted that
he identifies personally as a classic British liberal.
You've probably heard that, Cody.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, this is not an uncommon statement from intellectual figures on the right.
Many of them identify as classical liberals.
When they do so, they are putting themselves in line with an intellectual tradition that
is descended in large part from a 19th century philosopher and British member of parliament
named John Stuart Mill.
In his influential essay, On Liberty, Mill wrote this.
There ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing as a matter of ethical
conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion,
mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he if he had the power
would be justified in silencing mankind.
Now, when classical liberals like Peterson talk about free speech, they are calling upon
the ideas they inherited from Mill, or at least the ideas they believe they inherited
from Mill.
I found a great article about this on the conversation titled The Strange Origins of
Free Speech Warriors.
Quote, In truth, thinkers such as Mill were far from being libertarians, and what's more
would never have embraced the borderline absolutist position of today's free speech warriors.
Just in what is called the harm principle, Mill argued for a big government approach
to situations in which the exercise of liberty might result in the harm to others or even
to the individual practicing it.
In On Liberty, he argues that parents of poor moral fiber may have their children removed
from the home and calls for similar state intervention to stop the harms caused by gamblers,
prostitutes, and the drug addicts.
Even more broadly, he decides that the uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation,
those who most need to be made wiser and better, usually desire at least, and if they desire
it, would be incapable of finding the way to it by their own lights.
They've got to go.
Yeah.
Mmm.
Yeah.
Now, I'd be a little bit remiss in talking about the harm principle, without getting
into a little bit of the history of US Jewish prudence as it relates to free speech cases.
In March of 1919, which is about 100 years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes, time does fly,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, uh, Ohomi, Win-Homesy, Oh-Wendy, Oh-Wimsy, that's a good nickname
for Oh-Wimsy, Supreme Court Justice, wrote a series of unanimous opinions on three cases
upholding the convictions and prison sentences of members of the Socialist Party.
These people's crime had been writing and distributing some 15,000 flyers to men who
were in the process of being conscripted.
The flyers argued that conscription was involuntary servitude and prohibited by the 13th Amendment.
Also involved were the court cases of Eugene Debs, a socialist presidential candidate who
protested against World War I in a speech.
Debs and his comrades were found to have violated the espionage and sedition acts, and justifying
their incarceration, Holmes wrote,
Words which, ordinarily, and in many cases would be within the freedom of speech protected
by the First Amendment, may become subject to prohibition when of such nature and used
in such circumstances as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about
the substantive evils of which Congress has a right to prevent.
Now Holmes went on to write a line that has since become famous,
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting
fire in a theater and causing a panic.
I'm going to quote next from an article in the LA Review of Books by Stephen Rode about
sort of where all this ends after we jail all these socialists for free speech.
Only eight months later, in November 1919, joined by his protege, Justice Brandeis, in
the case Abrams v. United States, Holmes would signal a dramatic and pivotal shift in his
approach to the First Amendment, as recounted in the illuminating essay, Right Skepticism
and Majority Rule at the Birth of the Modern First Amendment by Vincent Blasey, Corliss
Lamont Professor of Civil Liberties at Columbia Law School, which explains why the year 1919
deserves to inaugurate the free speech century.
Holmes' dissent planted the fertile seeds of our modern-day First Amendment jurisprudence.
Holmes declared that the ultimate good-desired is better reached by free trade and ideas,
that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the
competition of the market, and that the truth is the only ground upon which their wishes
safely can be carried out.
He saw the Constitution as an experiment, as all life is an experiment, but he warned
that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions
that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death unless they so immediately threaten
interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law, that an immediate check
is required to save the country.
This is what he does eight months after agreeing that those socialists ought to be jailed for
saying that the trafficking people is kind of like slavery.
Now Holmes' views, these new views that he shifted to, they would be codified in American
law 50 years later during the 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio case, in another unanimous decision
the Supreme Court overturned the conviction of a KKK leader who had led a rally of armed
men.
These clansmen had burnt crosses and talked about taking revenge against the inwards and
Jews that inclaimed that the US government continues to suppress the white Caucasian
race.
They announced plans for the 4th of July march on Washington DC.
In his pure curiam opinion for the court, Justice William Brennan wrote, the constitutional
guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a state to forbid it or prescribe
advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where an advocacy is directed to inciting
or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
It's interesting to me, when we talk about the history of the evolution of free speech
in this country, that when socialists told draftees that being conscripted violated their
human rights, that speech was too dangerous to be protected.
But when white supremacists carried guns and promised to take vengeance on black people
and Jews, the Supreme Court decided that's explicitly protected as long as they don't
say that vengeance should occur on this exact day.
I would say it's unbelievable, but it isn't.
It's law's neat, right?
Yeah, man, the people threatening lives are fine.
This adds up to me.
The socialists.
If you don't say a date.
If I don't say a date.
If you don't say a date.
Oh, okay.
Just say we should take revenge against the Jews, but don't say we should take revenge
against the Jews on July 15th.
Okay.
That's where I did it in a sticky, sticky water.
So as long as it's not like an organized flash mob type situation, then yeah.
Yeah.
Good to know.
Cool.
You know what else is cool?
It is probably.
Services?
Wait, E1 and N2?
Oh yeah, there's going to be a service or two.
I got both.
I got both.
Oh boy.
I hope it's a dick pill ad.
We really could use some dick pills.
Hymns.
Great dick pills.
Hymns?
Hymns.
Did you hear about that there's a new drug being developed for women to make women
aroused?
Yeah.
And like, that seems like incredibly complicated morally, seems like a dangerous kind of drug
to make available to just like.
To women.
I think it's a dangerous drug to make available to men.
That's what I'm getting at.
That's what I'm getting at.
That's my worry.
I have no issue with women taking whatever drug.
All four women taking control of that.
I'm concerned about men getting hold of that drug.
Yes, I hear you.
But you know what I'm not concerned with?
Services and drugs.
I was going to say just erection drugs in general.
Oh yeah, sure.
Because I don't know if you guys know this, but the climate is collapsing and sex is zero
emissions.
Yeah, sex is on the rise.
It's on the rise.
It's good.
It's good to have.
And with all these horrible facts we read, sometimes it's hard to get an erection.
So dick pills.
You'll be worried about women slipping your dick pills into drinks if you hear that.
Yeah.
The one thing I don't know where to go.
I ruined it.
It's probably going to be a Microsoft ad after this anyway, which.
Oh, perfect.
Oh yeah.
Talk about a dick pill.
One way or the other, buy some dick pills.
That was a free ad I just gave you.
Don't be Microsoft.
Be MacroHard.
Damn.
That was so good.
I think we get like twice as much ad money from that one.
We get millions of dollars.
That was a high score.
Millions of dollars will be like Dr. Jordan Peterson.
I'm going to tell people to only eat meat.
Oh, I do not want to be like.
No, no.
All right.
Here's some ads.
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podcasts.
We're back from our cursing digressions.
My wife thinks I'm Jesus.
Cody's pretending to be Dr. Triforce Peterson again.
I've never done it.
I'm working on it.
He's working on it.
Who's currently doing it?
Getting his type five?
With the comedy seller?
We just talked a little bit about the origins of free speech law and how it's evolved over
the last century.
How maybe it's enforced on one side and not so much on the other.
Forgiven when it's really extreme?
Yeah.
Maybe that's a little weird.
For human rights?
Like, look the other way.
Now let's talk about the organized and well funded campaign to make sure freedom of speech
continues to evolve.
in a very specific direction. Freedom Speech Law, I should say, is the concept itself,
although that too. Y'all ever heard of Brett Weinstein? Sure have. Oh good! I was gonna
bring him up earlier, and here we are. He was a biology professor at Evergreen State College,
who went viral online for opposing a protest that asked white students and faculty to stay home
as part of a symbolic protest against white supremacy. Now, he was not fired for this,
but he was criticized for his actions, so he resigned, sued the school, and got a bunch of
money in a settlement, and then did the rounds talking to Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, David Rubin,
and the other icons of what is now called the intellectual dark web. Now, another member
of the intellectual dark web, and a guest on literally all of those same podcasts,
is a guy named Jonathan Haight, co-author of the Atlantic article, The Coddling of the American
Mind. You know what I'm building too right now? I feel like probably, yeah. Let's do your thing.
Let's do it. I like using his voice. It's exciting. We can do a whole episode like this of our
election podcast. I'm gonna talk like this to balance that. We'll get you some Thorazine,
we'll get Cody and I. What kind of drug makes your voice high? Helium. Helium and Thorazine Day.
That's how we do the Autism One Conference episode. Nailing it. Helium and Thorazine.
We're making plans folks. We're making plans folks. It's gonna be a great podcast.
Let's continue the podcast that we're already doing. The current one, yeah. Now, the intellectual
dark web itself was first coined and defined by Barry Weiss, staff editor of the New York Times
opinion section. She has also been a guest on Joe Rogan's podcast. Now, we noted earlier that the
claims of that coddling of the American mind article don't hold up to evidence. Four years of
college, of course, makes people less supportive of banning any kind of free speech, and young
people are more tolerant of offensive speech than older Americans. No matter what academic free
speech grifters like Weinstein may claim, the foundation for individual rights and educations
found that in 2018, there were a grand total of 18 disinvitation attempts across all colleges and
universities in the United States. Not all of those succeeded. Given that young people are more
likely to tolerate offensive speech and that college students are less likely to support
free speech restrictions in the general population, one is left wondering what all this hubbub
arose from. It may have something to do with the fact that Generation Z, or the I generation,
is further to the left than any other group in this country. 70% of them believe the government
should be more involved in problem solving. 62% say racial and ethnic diversity is good for society,
compared to 49 and 48% of baby boomers, respectively. Now, Generation Z also prefers
socialism to capitalism by a marked majority. And this, you might expect, is terrifying to
several small but influential groups in our country. And when I say small, I mean like two guys.
The Coke Brothers. Yeah, here we go, baby. That is where it was going. I'd like to quote
next from a fantastic article in The American Prospect by Aaron Friedman, which inspired this
episode. Quote, Dave Rubin's influential podcast, The Rubin Report, has a financial partnership
with Learn Liberty. A think tank started by the Coke-funded Institute for Humane Studies,
IHS, where Charles G. Koch himself sits on the board. When the Canadian government denied Jordan
Peterson funding for his work, Rebel Media, a group funded with Coke money and headed by
Ezra Levant, a far-right Islamophobe with ties to the Koch network, raised cash for him.
Peterson has since returned the favor, fundraising for the IHS. Ben Shapiro has collected speaker
fees from the Coke-funded Young Americans Foundation and Turning Point USA. And Brett
Weinstein was hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Stout's Free Speech Week, a project of
their Center for the Study of Institutions and Innovation. Funded by, you guessed it,
the Charles G. Koch Foundation. It's not just the IDW itself. Some of its key popularizers also
get Coke funding. Barry Weiss and the Atlantic's Conor Freezerdorf, who has been one of the most
visible defenders of Peterson in the mainstream media, have both received cash prizes from the
Koch-funded Reason Foundation, where David Koch himself sits on the board of trustees.
And remember the coddling of the American mind? Well, one of its co-authors, Greg Lukianoff,
is the head of that campus free speech watchdog, FIRE. That organization is funded, of course,
by the Koch brothers. For good measure, the Charles Koch Institute also did a
laudatory write-up of the piece. The Atlantic is perhaps the worst defender. Last year it
launched The Speech Wars, a reporting project that seeks to understand where free speech is in
danger and where it has been abused. Even though the magazine had just been bought by billionaire
Lorraine Powell Jobs and was seeing all-time high circulation web traffic, the Atlantic
solicited funding for the project from none other than the Charles Koch Foundation, the
Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute were also underwriters.
When I asked the Atlantic for comment, a spokesperson replied that the editorial
control for the series, as with every piece of journalism we create, rests solely with the
Atlantic. But the magazine refused to deny that reporters and editors with The Speech Wars are
ever in contact with the Koch Foundation. Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg did not respond
to my request for comment, and the Atlantic has not disclosed how much money it has received
from the Koch Foundation. That's actually pretty surprising for me. Yeah, the first half I was
like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, wait, what? I know, and then I was like, excuse me.
That just kept going. Mm-hmm. Wow, we. Yeah.
Interesting. All together. Yeah, they're terrified. Yeah. They are. They are scary young folks.
They are, I mean, they're like really going forward with funding a lot of like
centrist for the, and like. Yeah, they are fucking terrified of losing, of literally losing like
two to four percent of their wealth. Right. Richard Fink, president of the Charles G. Koch
charitable foundation, has explained this whole strategy in talking about his structure of social
change philosophy. The basic idea is to spend Koch money in strategic ways to influence broad
social change. Fink believes college campuses are one of the most important places to spend
money in order to institute changes, and that's why all this is happening. The Kochs and their
billionaire friends who help fund their foundation directly to fund the free speech grifters,
because they see what's coming, a generation who wants to take their money and use it for
such violins as clean water in American cities, roads, and basic health care. They aren't scared
on behalf of free speech. They're scared on behalf of their bank accounts. Mm-hmm. I mean,
that's it. I mean, that's it right there. Yeah. It reminded me of, you know, the Daily Beast is
obviously very liberal. Yeah, I know it says that. The thing, half the time, not half the time, but
every so often, you go on there and they've got an article, an ad masquerading as an article,
by the Koch brothers. They're like, the Koch brothers plan to make, to improve your...
They're going to save the world, yeah. To save the world. I think that's actually the headline
that one of them was. The Koch brothers plan to save the world. It's brought to you by the Koch
brothers. It's a charitable foundation. Very upset. Who may be advertising on this episode.
I feel like there's a chance, there's a non-zero chance. It's always so obvious and
interesting and keeps going and going. Just the amount of projection from these people.
Obviously, the free speech thing and the censorship on campus is the opposite, as we've
discussed. But then you have all these people who really go hard in on George Soros is using
his billions of dollars to all that stuff. Everyone who's saying that is funded by these
billionaires. You're showing your cards, man. How did you get that idea in your head? From your
personal experience? Also, if you take it on face value, what's the purpose? One is for
humanitarian reasons and one is to protect their money. Yeah, it makes me crazy that this age we
live in is not me, you, not all you. Yeah, it's very frustrating. It's very frustrating. I love
that the media is constantly attacked for being liberal and left-leaning, but even very liberal
sites will regularly host op-eds about how the Koch brothers are great and libertarianism is good
and limits on emissions are bad. She's not going to fucking see on the Atlantic. I'm going to
fucking see in the Daily Beast as an article on why workers should control the means of production.
The framing of the far-left media is just so frustrating. I haven't seen an article about
how profits are theft from workers. I haven't seen that in a while. I haven't seen anybody.
Also, obviously, there's a bias against Trump and everything, but even at that,
even talking about stuff, they're so concerned with not appearing biased that they oftentimes...
Yeah. It's like the fucking... These people who call themselves fucking journalists,
and I want to just punch in the face for even using that word, who like say,
look, it may be accurate to call them concentration camps, but it really offends people.
And in order to have a productive conversation, we should like, that's not journalism.
Journalism is looking outside and being like, oh, hey, it's raining. Oh,
hey, there's a concentration camp. Look at it. It's a concentration camp. It's going to hurt
the feelings of all the dry people. Yeah. Make people jealous. Hashtag dry pride.
I didn't realize Barry Weiss was also fine by the Koch brothers. Yeah, that was a surprise too.
That's a real cool. I didn't realize the Atlantic got Koch money either.
You didn't realize that either. That's really disappointing. Yep. Very disappointing.
That's wild. This is probably torpedoed in my chances to write an op-ed for the Atlantic.
I don't know. It'll be okay. It'll be all right. Just give them some ad money.
Yeah, I'll give them some ad money for my dick pills. Yeah, exactly. Just like even separate
from a company, just of the concept of pills that give people erections. Yeah, just be like,
hey, what's... What about that? Just like, what about pills for your dick?
And then I'll sneak in a line about how if you pay attention to the way the economy works,
whenever wages rise, the stock market falls because it's fundamentally outside of the
interests of the capital holding classes for workers to make more money because that money
that goes to them in wages does not go to the stock holding class in profits. And as a result,
the people who actually own stocks have diametrically opposed interest to everyone listening to this
podcast. Dick's pills. Yeah, penises. They're fun. That's... I love whenever that happens,
like, oh, the stock market's on the rise. So? What? How many stocks you got, bro?
Right, like, why should any of these people give a shit? If I know you, like, you probably
have enough money for rent and a couple of six packs, and like, yeah, you're probably not gonna...
If you have a 401k, you got it the way I did, which is not knowing you had a 401k.
Right. You had that job, and you're like, oh, okay.
Thank you for this thing, I understand. Cool. Yeah. Anyway, that's the episode.
That was a great episode, frustrating all the things that are expected.
I stopped myself from going on various tyrants. I'm gonna do a dangerous thing,
and then I'm gonna have you guys play your way out. I've got the half-smashed
LaCroix bottle, and I got my machete, and I'm gonna try to hit it into the sounding boards
as if I am batting a tennis ball. I don't know what kind of ball you bat this way,
but that's what I'm gonna do now for this audio-only podcast. Yeah!
Made it a decent distance, didn't hit the sounding boards. Got close. It was fun.
Yeah. Good time. You could do it again if you practice.
You guys want to plug your plugables? Yeah, you know, check us out. We have a podcast
called Even More News, and also a YouTube show called Some More News. That's correct.
My name's Katie Stoll. You can find me on Twitter at Katie Stoll.
My name's Cody Johnston. You can find me on Twitter at Dr. Mr. Cody.
My name is Katie Johnston, and Robert Evans, and actually you can find me at the internet.
Sophie's not here. I am not doing well. You're doing great. You're doing great. Thank you.
Don't worry about it. She's here in spirit.
BehindTheBastards.com is our podcast where you can find all the sources for this episode.
You can also find us on tpublic.com, where you can buy shirts and cups,
and that will make someone's stock market price. Someone's stock? Oh, yeah.
Some stock will go, even if it's fucking cotton socks anyway, and then every one thing will
be better, as I understand the stock market. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at BastardsPod. That's the fucking episode.
Go home or ride in the streets. One of the two.
Good bye. Patreon.com. Oh, yeah.
For stock. Oh, yeah. For stock. That's the kind of stock I can get. Exactly. Stock.
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