The Daily Signal - Casey Mattox on Why Students Who Fight for Free Speech Often Win

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Free speech has seen better days on the college campus. Increasingly, conservative ideas are unwelcome and even shouted down. At some schools, religious groups are being kicked off campus for not allowing non-believers to run their organization. It’s a concerning state of affairs—and yet, many students are pushing back and winning in the courtroom. In today's episode, I speak with Casey Mattox about upholding the First Amendment on campus. We also discuss whether tech companies have any role in protecting free speech. Read the lightly edited transcript of the interview, posted below, or listen on the podcast: We also cover the following stories: Daily Signal pushes back on YouTube after being censored. U.S. family is massacred in Mexico by drug cartels. Project Veritas hot mic sheds light on a potential Epstein cover-up. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet,iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, November 6th. I'm Kate Trinko. And I'm Daniel Davis. Free speech has seen better days on college campuses. Increasingly, conservative ideas are unwelcome and even shouted down. Meanwhile, in some places, religious groups are being kicked off campus for not allowing non-believers to run their organization. It's a concerning state of affairs, and yet many students are pushing back and they're winning in the courtroom. Today I'll speak with Casey Maddox about upholding the First Amendment on campus. I'll also ask him whether tech companies like Facebook have any role in protecting free speech.

And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. YouTube's hate speech policy means that a doctor with the wrong views can't speak freely on the world's large. video platform. In July, the Daily Signal discovered that a popular video we had done, featuring Dr. Michelle Kirtella, a pediatrician, on gender dysphoria and children, was no longer on YouTube. We reached out to the tech giant and were told that the video violated YouTube's hate speech policy. After a series of appeals, we were finally told that the

only way the video could go back up on YouTube was if we deleted this sentence. See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you're mentally ill. But if you want to cut off, healthy breasts or a penis, you're transgender. To us hear the daily signal, that's unacceptable. We agree that transgender people should be treated with love and respect. But pediatricians who refuse to follow the woke medical practices should not be censored. Every day, parents are facing tough choices about what kind of medical treatment. to give to their children struggling with gender dysphoria.

They deserve to hear the full facts, not just the politically correct facts. While we believe YouTube is a private company that is entitled to make its own rules, we also think that the free market should play a role here. If you disagree with this decision, please tweet at YouTube or at Google, YouTube's parent company, or leave a comment on their Facebook walls. We know there's tremendous pressure on YouTube and other tech companies from liberal activists to ban any conservative thought on LGBT issues. We need to show these tech companies that there's also a large number of Americans who want conservative voices to be able to speak freely on YouTube. A Mormon community in Mexico is grieving after nine of its members were killed in an ambush by a Mexican cartel.

The group included three women and six children, all of whom were U.S. citizens and members of the extended Liberian family. The community has resided in northern Mexico for decades. President Trump responded to the news on Twitter, saying, A wonderful family and friends from Utah got caught between two vicious drug cartels who were shooting at each other, with the result being many great American people killed. He offered U.S. military assistance to Mexico and said, the cartels have become so large and powerful that sometimes you need an army to defeat an army. But one member of the community, Lenzo Widmar, told the Washington Post that the cartel members

actually knew they were firing on civilians. Another member of the community, Alex Labaron, tweeted, this is how he live under the government of Lopez Obrador. Mexican Mormons, innocent women and children were ambushed in the Chihuahua Sierra, shot and burned alive by the cartels that rule in Mexico. The United States is saying goodbye to the Paris Agreement and international climate agreement. According to Heritage Foundation researcher Nick Loras, the Paris Agreement wouldn't have significantly affected the climate,

but it would have had a big impact on the U.S. economy, costing America 400,000 jobs in the average family, 20,000 in income by 2035. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, said in a statement, today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Per the terms of the agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations. The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification. The U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, revised his official testimony to Congress

on Tuesday. He now admits that he was involved in a quid pro quo, with Ukraine. Sondland said he told a top Ukrainian official that U.S. military assistance was contingent upon Ukraine releasing a public anti-corruption statement that they had discussed for many weeks. The Wall Street Journal reports, the statement that Mr. Sondland and other U.S. officials had been discussing was to specifically address Burisma Group, a Ukrainian gas company where Mr. Biden's son, Hunter, had sat on the board and alleged election interference, according to congressional testimony. But Republican Congressman Mark Meadows responded by saying that all of this was overblown. He said on Twitter, seeing many overblown and outright false reports about Ambassador Sondland's

testimony, here's what he actually said. One, I did not and still don't know why aid was held up. Two, I presumed it was because of corruption. Three, I told Yermek my assumption. Yermak is a top Ukrainian official. Now Democrats are asking, acting White House Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, to talk to House impeachment investigators. Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Elliot Engel, and Acting Government Reform and Oversight Committee Chair, Carolyn Maloney, wrote in a letter to Mulvaney. Based on evidence gathered in the impeachment inquiry and public reporting, we believe that you possess substantial firsthand knowledge and information relevant to the House's impeachment inquiry.

Specifically, the investigation has revealed that you may have been directly involved in an effort orchestrated by President Trump, his personal agent, Rudolph Giuliani, and others to withhold a coveted White House meeting and nearly 400 million in security assistance in order to pressure Ukrainian President Voldemier Zelensky to pursue investigations that would benefit President Trump's personal political interests and jeopardized our national security in attempting to do. do so. Well, all of this impeachment drama is seriously dividing the American public along party lines. A new Gallup survey found that 87% of Democrats want President Trump impeached, while 92% of Republicans do not want him impeached. That's a record level of division over impeachment. By comparison, during the Watergate scandal, 59% of Republicans opposed impeaching President Nixon, while 71% of Democrats supported impeachment. Project Veritas, the investigative outlet of James O'Keefe, released a video Tuesday of ABC News journalist Amy Roebuck, purportedly her on a hot mic or speaking into a mic but unaware that she was being recorded. I've had the story for three years. I've had this interview with Virginia Roberts. We would not put it on the air.

First of all, I was told, who's Jeffrey Epstein? No one knows who that is. This is a stupid story. Then the palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and three. threatened us a million different ways. We were so afraid we wouldn't be able to interview Kate and Will that we, that also quashed the story. And then Alan Dershowitz was also implicated in because of the planes. She told me everything. She had pictures. She had everything.

She was in hiding for 12 years. We convinced her to come out. We convinced her to talk to us. It was unbelievable what we had, Clinton. We had everything. I tried for three years. Raiders to get it on to no avail, and now it's all coming out, and it's like these new revelations that I freaking had all of it. Robach released a statement later on Tuesday. Via the Associated

press, she had this to say. As a journalist, as the Epstein story continued to unfold last summer, I was caught in a private moment of frustration. I was upset that an important interview I had conducted with Virginia Roberts didn't air because we could not obtain sufficient corroborating evidence to meet ABC's editorial standards about her allegations. My comments about Prince Andrew and her allegation that she had seen Bill Clinton on Epstein's private island were in reference to what Virginia Roberts said in that interview in 2015.

I was referencing her allegations, not what ABC News had verified through our reporting. The interview itself, while I was disappointed it didn't air, didn't meet our standards. In the years since, no one ever had. ever told me or the team to stop reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, and we have continued to aggressively pursue this important story. Up next, a conversation with Casey Maddox about free speech on campus and on social media. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head?

If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. now by Casey Maddox. He serves as vice president of legal and judicial strategy for Americans for Prosperity. And you may have seen his byline at National View, where he writes frequently, and recently he wrote a piece for The Daily Signal, which you also may have seen. Casey, thanks for your time today. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. So Casey, I want to ask you about free speech on the university campus. It's such an important issue today, one that you've worked on a lot. traditionally the university has been the most friendly place for free thought and free speech it's been encouraged

but today on so many campuses it's the exact opposite you know free speech is under threat and i saw actually a recent study from this year by the knight foundation which did a survey of college students saying that 46% of college students surveyed think it's more important to promote inclusion on campus than to protect free speech. Are you concerned that this, you know, hostile attitude toward free speech that we're seeing more of among college students is going to carry over when they become adults and become really more of a mainstream view in America that threatens to undermine free speech? Well, I am.

I'm concerned, I think, that, I mean, as you said, what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus, right? So it would be one thing if we were just talking about campus free speech issues as a problem for the marketplace of ideas for a four-year period of students' lives. But it doesn't work that way. You know, the students on college campuses are essentially learning what it looks like to be a citizen in our republic for the very first time, right? You're an 18-year-old. You go to public university. You're away from your parents. and you're working with government officials on a daily basis,

from your faculty members to the administrators, and getting an understanding of what you should expect as a citizen. And that concerns me in some ways more than the free speech problem itself is what it implies for the notion of someone's status as a citizen when they see that the government can tell them when and where you can speak, what you're allowed to say, who you're allowed to associate with, the government has an interest in exactly how your private group of students runs itself and functions, when and where you can have meetings.

If people get used to that sort of a notion of how the government works and what their relationship with the government looks like, I think that's as much of a concern as anything else. Right. Well, what's interesting on campus, you know, you see speakers get shut down almost routinely now. conservative speakers and you know many on the left will say look there's no actual threat to free speech as long as you're not saying racist or inflammatory things and there's that caveat there they'll draw comparisons to you know the Nazis or something and say look any

free society has to draw boundaries to determine what's to be tolerated and what's beyond the pale so you know if we're going to have a tolerant society or if we're going to tolerate each other, then we have to be able to exclude certain kinds of inflammatory speech. How would you respond to that, especially when it's directed toward somewhat mainstream activists on campus? So I'll give just a little bit of pushback. Only on the point about the shutdowns and that particular issue and its frequency.

I think that is in some ways kind of overstated, as the core of the problem. I think the real problem with campus free speech is the same problem it has been for a very long time, which is basically government institutions, creating what continue to be unconstitutional rules, telling students when and where they can speak, what they're allowed to say, who they can associate with.

Those continue to be the main source of the problem. There is an increasing tendency of, or an increased tendency of students to shout down and not want to allow speakers to happen. But I think we can, those are so much more sort of exciting examples, I guess, in one sense, that it's easy to overstate that in our heads. It is still the case that Ben Shapiro and certainly a whole lot of other conservative speakers far more frequently speak on college campuses without any incident at all. It's just when it happens and we see those instances, they're obviously infuriating.

That, you know, the sort of attitude we see toward free speech and the situations upset us. But reality is I think it's something still, according to FIRE Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, I think it's about 90% of colleges still have constitutionally problematic written policies. And that's happening on college campuses all the time still. And that's the mindset we need to get changed, I think, is universities that continue to just tell students that it's the government's responsibility to tell you when and where you can speak and what you're allowed to say. I would like to get that cleaned up. And I think, you know, the more I think that policymakers can focus even on that issue rather than on the shout down issue, which frankly, and we can talk about this in a bit, but get a little complicated on how to solve that problem, I think the real. written policy problem is the one that the policymakers would do well to focus on. And frankly,

I think part of the problem with the shoutdowns is that it's natural if students are being told all the time that speech is too dangerous for the university to permit in certain areas. Words are too dangerous for the school to allow you to say that they start to get the idea that that must be true and they must do whatever they can to prevent people from saying words. Well, in recent years, We've seen some Christian groups and other religious student groups actually getting kicked off campus because the school says they're discriminating by requiring their leaders to adhere to a certain faith. So if you're intervarsity, Christian fellowship, and you require your leaders to be Christians, well, that's discrimination because you're not allowing the Muslim to lead the Christian group, which I think for a lot of people is a bit nonsensical. But some universities have been making that case. just recently a case, the University of Iowa lost its case against intervarsity after they had kicked them off campus.

Obviously, the trend on campus here is not good, but at least in the courts, the students seem to be winning. No, that's right. I mean, we are seeing significant wins, I think, in courts on these issues. I've joked before that, because I litigated campus free speech cases for many years, and if you want to impress your friends and make it look like you're appalled, Clement with a winning percentage, litigate campus free speech cases. Because when you actually get to court, you win. The problem, or when you actually get to a decision, you'll, you know, you're very likely to win. The problem with campus free speech cases is that there's, it's so often difficult to get to an actual decision. Because there just aren't a lot of incentives for universities to fix their

policies up front. And it's unlikely that you're going to be able to really hold them accountable down the road because of for a number of issues, immunity doctrines that protect them and various other legal doctrines that end up making sure that the school really has very little incentive to address the policies up front. They can wait until they're sued and then drag it out and fix them later. But, you know, it certainly is encouraging to see the wins that are coming in court on some of these, on the freedom of association cases. I mean, everybody should be able to agree that students should be able to gather together and express common ideas. And you can't express a common idea if you don't have a spokesperson who agrees with that idea. And that's basically all those cases are about

is the freedom of people to gather together and express an idea in common. Well, some states have begun to take action and try to put pressure on publicly funded schools to make sure that they're making space for free speech and actively upholding it. Alabama, one of those states, states. What do you think of state efforts to do that, as well as the president's executive order, which a lot of college activists, free speech activists have praised? Do you think these governments are correct to step in and to try to uphold the practice of free speech on campus? I think particularly state policymakers certainly have an interest in making sure that free speech is protected on their college campuses. You can't have an education on a college campus

without freedom of speech and freedom of association. And that's, so if they're appropriating a lot of money for universities to function in this way, you want to make sure that free speech is actually being protected. I will never discourage policymakers from caring about the Constitution. So I think that's great. And certainly a lot of the legislation we've seen over the last year, we had more campus free speech bills passed in state legislatures this last year than ever before. and of those, almost all of them, were ones that I think strongly protected and were very positive moves

toward student free speech. Alabama is a good example of that. Iowa and in Oklahoma and Arkansas, a number of states who passed very positive campus free speech bills. I do have a concern with, particularly with one, with Texas, I think is a good example where Texas legislators ended up with a state law that, among other things, What has two problems. One, they decided that if you disrupt someone else's expression, then you can be expelled from the school. And they didn't define what it means to disrupt someone else's expression. And I think that's concerning. I've talked with pro-life student groups and others who are concerned that if you have administrators that are being told you must punish students if they disrupt someone else. But you don't clearly define what exactly it means. You are empowering, empowering government officials, essentially.

with a very powerful tool to punish disfavored speech. So that concerns me there. But I think for the most part, state legislators have been doing a very good job over the last couple of years trying to address the very real problems of sort of university-imposed obstacles on free speech. On the president's executive order, I think we're kind of in a wait-and-see on this. I think, you know, again, I will never criticize the president for caring about free speech. I think that's a very positive thing.

I think the concern that a lot of folks have with exactly how it will be implemented by the agencies, or that there are a lot of ways that if the agencies themselves start stepping into the campus free speech issues that should be being played out in courts, you could end up, one, with a very large bureaucracy that's managing campus free speech policy that could be bad just from the growth of bureaucracy problem. It could also be bad if you end up with some of the legal development that needs to happen in the courts where you need the Supreme Court to step in and instead it gets derailed from there. The other thing that I worry about there is if you end up in a place where, you know, if you have a student in a speech zone situation and a federal judge is looking at that

case where a student is just trying to distribute, you know, literature in a speech, outside of a speech zone on a university campus, if a federal judge in making a decision on the First Amendment and support of that student knows that they will also be taking billions of dollars in research funding away from that university, I think it will make it a lot harder to get judges to do what they should be doing and enforcing the Constitution if there are those kinds of consequences. So it's a challenging thing, trying to figure out exactly what the role of the agencies are, and we're basically waiting to see what happens as the agencies roll out their regulations to actually implement the rule. Well, campuses, you know, get caught up in this so often because they are

such a forum for speech. But another one of those major forums these days is social media, and you've got increasing numbers of voices, including in the Senate from folks like Senator Josh Hawley, Republican, saying that tech companies, social media companies, bear a responsibility to uphold the First Amendment to it, you know, to the fullest extent. And because they've become such a massive forum that they're almost effectively a public utility. And that if they aren't upholding our free speech rights the way we would like, then the government needs to step in and protect our natural rights to free speech. obviously that comes with the threat of regulation.

What do you think about this? Do social media companies bear responsibility to uphold and protect free speech? And should the government intervene at any point? Well, you know, I think one would hope, right, that social media companies would allow the greatest amount of speech on their platforms possible. And we all want that. I think the challenge here is, you know, I would certainly disagree, and I'm not sure he's quite at this place, but I know a number of other folks are, you know, arguing that social media companies are actually public utilities and should be sort of regulated in that way. I've seen people call for essentially a fairness doctrine for the internet and, you know, those sorts of approaches. And I just think that's fundamentally, it's not conservative, it's not pro-liberty. There is a, and I think, you know, sticking by fundamental principles where we have to say that these are private platforms, I have other options, it's in fact possible to not be on Facebook. My wife is not.

No, really? It's possible. My wife is not on Facebook. And so, you know, we have, I'm a frequent Twitter user. She is a frequently annoyed by my frequent Twitter use and is not on Twitter herself. So, you know, it is, it's possible to be. be a citizen in our republic without actually being on social media. So we have to remember that. You know, I think the, it's interesting. I will hear from a lot of folks often that, you know,

but the, you know, the real platform for, or the real marketplace of ideas has shifted online. But the whole first part of this entire conversation is about campus free speech, which is a very hot issue. None of that is online. None of those things we were talking about is online. everyone seems to still think that it's possible to express views on college campuses and be heard and for it to make a difference, right? Ben Shapiro is still going and speaking. Yaff still has a big speaker series. We see that happen. And then, so, you know, I think we over-emphasize the critical nature of online speech in part because a lot of us who are there forget that not everyone is, right?

And I go back home to Alabama and no one's on Twitter. And it's not a thing in my hometown in rural northeast Alabama. So one, I think that we sort of overemphasize that. And when we're thinking about it as a public utility as if it really is sort of like water or like electricity that everyone uses. It's not true. But these are fundamentally, they're private platforms. And I think they should not be punished for the fact that they've produced a product. that people like and that they use.

And the fact that they've been able to do that, I think is not something that they should be punished for. And of course, conservatives are big stakeholders in Facebook usage. I recall sitting recently Mark Zuckerberg at a committee hearing getting grilled by Congresswoman Alexandria Kaiser Cortez for holding meetings with these right-wing people, you know, hanging out with conservatives,

when really he was just, wanting to know how he could, and Facebook could do a better job of serving this massive constituency. So it does seem that conservatives are having a real impact just by being stakeholders. No, I think that's right. I mean, you know, Facebook is, you know, your average user on Facebook is basically, you know, a kind of middle-aged or even older than middle-aged conservative grandmother. Right. That is your average Facebook user.

and I think Ben Shapiro's content I've understood is actually the most shared content on Facebook. So you would understand why some folks on the left might be upset about that. It's puzzling to me how you end up in this place, though, where people from both the left and the right are essentially calling for the exact same sorts of regulation, not realizing that if you get that, you know i think i said in the daily signal piece that it's much more likely i think that you end up with warren book instead of holly book um if we go down this path um that given the way our culture uh is uh seems to be headed um you know i think if if conservatives start giving into the idea that we should be regulating the internet we need to break up uh tech companies all those sorts of

of approaches that we're hearing from folks on the left i think it's it's likely that we're we end up with something that a lot of folks on the right would be very rightly concerned about the kind of outcome they would get. Casey Maddox, thanks so much for your time today. Thank you. That's it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast brought to you from the Robert H. Bruce Radio Studio at the Heritage Foundation.

Please be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or Spotify. And please give us a review or rating on iTunes to give us any feedback. We'll see you again tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Daniel Davis. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, the Leah Rampersad, and Mark Geinney. For more information, visitdailysignal.com.