Transcript of Episode 90 with Stuart Taylor

 

Episode 90- Rich Helppie and Stuart Taylor
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge. The fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur and the technology health and finance space. He and his wife, Leslie, are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally under-served children.

Rich Helppie:
Hello and welcome to the Common Bridge. The Common Bridge is the fiercely nonpartisan, issue oriented podcast and YouTube channel, where we discuss the issues of the day, the opportunities of the moment and what some of the policy responses to those might be. And today our topic fits in around some of the issues around our first amendment rights, some of the topics that we’ve been covering about news reporting and attempts to limit speech. And we welcome to the Common Bridge today, Stuart Taylor, Jr. Stuart, welcome to the Common Bridge.

Stuart Taylor:
Thanks for having me, nice to be with you.

Rich Helppie:
We will have a full bio out on RichardHelppie.com that’ll accompany this podcast and YouTube. Couple of highlights. Stuart Taylor is a very noted freelance writer who focuses on legal and policy issues, and he says, as a person who occasionally practices law, I think you’ll find his research, his analysis, and his opinion pieces-that have been in many online and print publications, including the American Lawyer, the Atlantic Legal Times, the New York Times-who nominated him for a Pulitzer prize, Newsweek, Real Clear Politics, and many others. He’s appeared on television, radio interviews and commentaries hundreds of times. He’s a book author and you’ve co-authored a couple of pieces that have earned some really prestigious awards, Stuart, those are…

Stuart Taylor:
I’ve co-authored three books and the best award any of them got was for the Duke Lacrosse rape fraud book, which was in 2007. The award was 2008, for exposing the terrible persecution of innocent lacrosse players on a bogus rape charge by a criminal district attorney who ultimately was disbarred. So that one won the award, the other two haven’t really won awards. They’ve won a lot of nice reviews that made me feel good, now they didn’t make a lot of money, but I liked the nice reviews. The second was called Mismatch. And it was about how affirmative action in admissions hurts students it’s supposed to help and why colleges hide that. And the third called The Campus Rape Frenzy, which was in 2017 with KC Johnson, the same guy I did the Duke book with, is about the crazed idea that there’s a rape epidemic on campus that was sweeping all these campuses and it led to-under Joe Biden’s leadership, by the way, during the Biden administration-led to many, many, many kangaroo court, unfair trials, presumed guilty type trials, of people who in a lot of cases were probably innocent. In some cases were utterly, clearly innocent. They were still found guilty and kicked out of college or suspended. And so that was the most recent.

Rich Helppie:
I’m certainly glad that you’re here today because of this commitment you have to the principles of free speech. You’re also co-founder of Princetonians for Free Speech. And that’s a group that, my understanding is, began as an outreach to alumni and friends of Princeton University and has since expanded beyond that.

Stuart Taylor:
We’re starting. I mean, we only have existed for two or three months. Our first move was to try and get alumni interested and then we’re moving to students and faculty and so forth. The reason for the focus on alumni is that frankly free speech is still very popular among most alumni, especially as they get older, like me, and not so much among undergraduates because free speech has been demonized for all the wrong reasons by a lot of people-generally on the left. Used to be free speech was demonized by people on the right. Now it’s demonized by people on the left for a variety of reasons that I’d be glad to refute. But we thought free speech was very much endangered at Princeton. My collaborator and I, I organized a letter writing campaign for an undergraduate at Princeton who was mercilessly harassed, called a racist, called a fascist, for signing a letter criticizing some demands on racial issues made by other students. They just brutalized this kid and it convinced my partner and I that Princeton needed Princetonians for Free Speech because it’s only going to get worse if something doesn’t turn the tide.

Rich Helppie:
Free speech, of course, should be a universal American value that everybody embraces. And we should be able to talk about things without fear of repercussion. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, free speech specifically on college campuses. Stuart, our audience-we get great feedback-they like to know a little bit about the background of people. So could you maybe give us a minute or two in your early days? Where’d you grow up, academic, little bit professional highlights, maybe a little personal insight. And then what are you up to today beside the work that you’re doing with Princetonians for Free Speech?

Stuart Taylor:
It’s only 72 years, so it won’t take long. I grew up in Philadelphia, moved to Santa Barbara, California at age 16, learned how to surf, not very well. I went to school out there. Came east to Princeton University, had a great time there for four years. And then I went to the Baltimore Sun as a reporter, kind of the usual early reporter stuff-go to the police beat, local county governments, and so forth. And I did that for a little over three years. And then I went to Harvard law school and graduated from there in three years. And then I did around the world fellowship trip and then to a Washington law firm called Wilmer Cutler and Pickering, which is a great law firm then, and now, much bigger now than then. And that was for three years and I loved it. But I didn’t love the practice of law. I loved the people there. And I had a chance, a sort of fluke, to get an interview with the New York Times Washington Bureau chief, to see whether they would hire me, and against against my expectation, they did after I went through a lot more interviews. Then I was there for eight years, mostly legal matters of different kinds for the first five years. The last three years, until 1988, covering the Supreme Court of the United States, which at the Times is a full-time job pretty much. And from there to smaller publications after 1988-and gosh, for another 30 years, it’s hard to believe it-smaller magazines freelancing and the like. And the reason going from bigger to smaller is complicated. But one reason for it was that I wanted to write opinion journalism, and I know I always did want to write it, but when I was young, you weren’t supposed to write opinion journalism, unless you were labeled an opinion journalist. That’s sort of going by the boards, but those are the rules when I was coming up at the time in ‘88, when I left the Times, it was to write opinion pieces for First True American Lawyer Media.

Rich Helppie:
We’ve had recent guests, Matt Taibbi and Joe Ferullo, also veterans of reporting, and earlier Mort Crim, award winning television journalist, all talking about the vast amount of changes in journalism and whether opinions crept in there and entertainment. And my sense in talking to people that are coming to the Common Bridge is they want something more akin to what we used to have in terms of an objective neutral press and let them weigh the facts, make up their own mind, instead of being steered or fed a particular line. But there’s been some serious things done with speech codes. And maybe as kind of a level set, we want to understand where things are today and then where we might go policy-wise. So we’re going to get a lot of education today, maybe some policy ideas. I’ve heard of some of the over the top incidents of these things called bias response teams. What have you discovered in your reporting about these bias response teams on campuses?

Stuart Taylor:
I have some notes in front of me that I’ll refer to because I can’t always remember it all. There’s lots of them all over the country, but they investigate professors online comments and the editorial choices of student groups among other things. And then sometimes they just investigate other students. They’re usually made up of students. Yale, for example, a few years ago, at least, put administrators through re-education programs to stamp out suspected implicit bias and prevent any deviation from the university’s notion of appropriate speech. A great judge named Jose Cabranes, who was the first general counsel of Yale University long before he became a judge, gave a speech there not long ago saying the Yale system of surveillance is reminiscent of the neighborhood watches that serve as the eyes and ears of totalitarian regimes, much like the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in Castro’s Cuba. And an otherwise critic of the universities put it this way, “these places are now in the grips of non-faculty bureaucratic [inaudible] that are difficult to remove. They run these places and a university president would have to proceed with a combination of stealthiness, fearlessness, and strength and character, to slow down the stampede into evermore stifling authoritarianism”. That’s one little taste and not every campus has as these bias response teams. But I think the fact that a lot do is sort of an indicator of how far gone things are. I remember when I was a little kid, my parents would talk to me about what it was like living in, say, Stalinist Russia. One thing I remember was, children were supposed to tell on their parents to the authorities. Well, the bias response teams are sort of like that. It’s not kids and parents, but you’re supposed to rat out your roommate, say, if he says a word that’s not supposed to be said on campus. Now, a lot of these things, they masquerade as policing hate speech. People saying the N word, insulting people with horrible words and so forth and Nazi stuff. There’s almost none of that on campuses today. The more prestigious, there’s almost none of it, but there’s this myth that there’s all sorts of hate speech going on. Now there’s hate speech going on in the United States, I wouldn’t deny that for a minute, but not at the universities really. They’re so politically correct that hate speech would get stamped out the minute it started at most of them. And so because the Left wants to pretend there’s a lot of hate speech they manufacture incidents. They’ll have a huge row about somebody who used the N word because it was in a book he assigned in class-Huckleberry Finn-as though he had been hurling the word at his students to insult them. And the students get into this and point fingers at the professors and it’s spread to, for example, the New York Times.

Rich Helppie:
I would encourage all the listeners and viewers of the Common Bridge to look up bias response incidents through your search engine, DuckDuckGo, and you’ll be surprised at what’s there. They can be innocent statements being made, and including my favorite, someone was turned in because there was a “phallic ice sculpture” on one of the college campuses. Not sure if the bias response team got there in time before the spring thaw or not. Stuart, we’re looking at the Princetonians for Free Speech. What would be the mission of Princetonians for Free Speech, and who are the members? Who’s funding it? What’s the annual budget?

Stuart Taylor:
We established Princetonians for Free Speech because we thought free speech was in trouble at Princeton, not worse than a lot of places, probably better than a lot of places, but in trouble. And what prompted us was that there was a lot of demands last summer, during the summer of racial reckoning and so forth, by students and faculty-hundreds of students, hundreds of faculty-for all sorts of racial policies, including censorship of anyone whose speech on racial matters displeased the people who were creating the policies, who were on the Left. And one kid at Princeton, a sophomore, who dared sign a statement signed by about 20 others, saying these things were a bad idea and kind of criticizing them in a fairly tough way but nothing uncivil, nothing racist. They trashed him on social media, other students, they called him a racist. They called him a fascist. They tried to ruin his chance of getting a summer job. They called for ostracizing him. This because he signed one letter. I’m not sure whether others got the same treatment, but I know about this guy. And I heard about him and organized a group of about almost 50 fellow alumni to write a letter to the president of the university about it, asking him to speak out against this sort of harassment. We didn’t actually ask him to discipline the people who are doing it because that might’ve implicated their first amendment rights, that gets a little tricky there, but calling on him to do something about it. He refused. Princeton actually has pretty decent free speech policies, but I think they sometimes use double standards in enforcing them. So the president of the university, who refused to do anything for this kid who was being harassed and persecuted, was very quick to fiercely denounce a professor who said something much less inflammatory-it was a little inflammatory-in an article he wrote. And so it seemed to us that Princeton and other campuses-we start with Princeton, but maybe go elsewhere later-free speech is in trouble and there’s no organized presence on campus. Most places, there’s no organized student group, no organized faculty group that’s committed to free speech. There are a lot of groups that are committed to suppressing free speech that they don’t like, but there’s nobody there to fight them. And so they are constantly pressuring the administration to do what they want. And they’re winning over time at Princeton and elsewhere, not in dramatic steps. And so we thought, well, who could push back? And one thing about alumni, being older, is they remember when free speech was a liberal cause. Now liberals, or people who call themselves liberals, trash free speech as racist or sexist or hate speech or whatnot, but back when I was growing up free speech was something liberals used to fight off censorship by conservatives. And a lot of the alumni remember that and therefore across the ideological spectrum, a lot of the alumni are committed to free speech-conservatives and liberals and moderates-at the universities. It’s hard to find somebody who will admit to being committed to free speech, except maybe a few conservatives.

Rich Helppie:
So the group is coming together as a result of some of these incidents at Princeton, it’s made up of Princeton alums. Is there a center of gravity, a leader, a funding mechanism? How are all those pieces coming together?

Stuart Taylor:
Well, a friend and I, Ed Yingling a classmate, we founded it and we brought in another friend to be on the board, John McCall. And we basically did all the work of [inaudible], creating a website, raising some money to pay for the website and to pay for maintaining the website, because an important part of the website is to republish articles that are revealing what’s going on, both at Princeton and at other campuses. And so one of our expenses, we may not have very big expenses, is one of them is to pay someone to keep track of what’s coming out and put them on the website. We probably have a budget of around, we haven’t been around long enough to really create a budget, but maybe $40,000 a year, maybe a little less.

Rich Helppie:
So very grassroots.

Stuart Taylor:
So far we’ve raised the money by calling friends who have become fairly wealthy in their lives. And we’ve gotten a lot of very generous contributions that are covering all their expenses to date. There are legal requirements that make it a little difficult to raise money on a mass basis. Like you can’t put something on the website saying, please give us money until you’ve gotten approvals from all sorts of state regulators, as well as the IRS to do that. So, so far we’ve been raising money mostly in large donations from friends and it’s been enough to handle what we want. What could make it more expensive is if we start sponsoring speakers, debates, events, as opposed to running this website. And then, of course, I think as I mentioned earlier, our first editorial or first real cause was to defend a professor we thought was being smeared in a vicious way by a lot of other students and professors and by the Daily Princetonian newspaper. This professor was being smeared for, initially for something he said on a racial matter, that probably was a little more inflammatory than it should have been and he’s not an inflammatory guy, but this got him in trouble with the Left. And so they went after him and called him a racist and tried to get him fired. This was last summer. And then when they failed to get him fired, the Daily Princetonian put its staff on a seven month dragnet investigation of his entire life to try and find anything they could use against him. And they found some allegations that he had been involved with female students more than 12 years ago, one supposedly sexually involved, a couple of others, supposedly from a [inaudible] that was it, it wasn’t a whole lot. And it was all a lot less than many Princeton professors and administrators have been doing through the years, but that was enough for the Daily Princetonian to attack this guy and try and make him look like a sexual predator, which he’s not, it was pure revenge, it was McCarthyist revenge, for his speech on racial matters.

Rich Helppie:
I think very few people could withstand an examination of their entire life, and particularly the generation that is coming of age with cell phones and everything being recorded. I think it’s going to lead to some very interesting dilemmas in the future. I think you’ve cited several good examples of speech suppression. And I’m wondering a couple of things, but how prevalent is suppression of free speech really? Are people really on hair triggers? And when I read about bias response teams, according to the New Republic, it says that they’re supposed to foster what they call a “safe and inclusive environment”. And you know, that sounds good, is that what’s been achieved?

Stuart Taylor:
I think not. At the most general level, certainly Princeton and not many universities, have terrible rules that could get you kicked out for free speech. That’s not usually the problem. The problem is usually persecution and harassment by other students, or persecution and harassment of professors by other students and other professors. And they actually-Princeton rules are pretty good protection against this kind of harassment if they’re enforced well, which they’re not always enforced well, but they’re pretty good rules. The so-called Chicago Principles protect the kind of free speech we’re all used to thinking of as deserving protection, but they can’t protect against somebody going on social media and calling you a racist because you said you don’t think affirmative action is such a good idea. And that’s the sort of thing that happens.

Rich Helppie:
So when I think about these bias response teams and the speech codes on campus, I’m wondering where the support for these things come from, because the New Republic, which is a liberal magazine, says they degrade education by encouraging silence instead of dialogue, the fragmentation of campuses into groups of like-minded people, and deliberate avoidance of many of the most important and controversial topics across all academic disciplines. And they go on to talk about speech codes being inherently anti intellectual, fundamentally at odds with the mission of higher education, and ultimately undermining the bedrock principle of the modern university, that more diversity leads to better learning. So who’s supporting these speech codes and these bias response teams that are trying to promote, enforce-whatever word you want to use-them against students and professors? Who can be for this thing? We seem to be eliminating critical thinking. It’s kind of like, is there a fringe group that just had a hair trigger for non-orthodoxy as they define it?

Stuart Taylor:
By the way, I certainly agree with what the New Republic wrote and I’m glad they wrote it because not every liberal journal in this day and age would have said that, I doubt the New York Times would have said it, for example. What happens on campus is the far Left has dominated the faculty on campus more and more ever since the 1970s to an ever, ever greater degree. There’s maybe one Republican professor on campus for every 12 Democrats in a lot of places, for example, and the one Republican’s probably laying low, especially if he doesn’t have tenure yet. And so this sets the tone on campus and a lot of the students, to some extent, have been conditioned while they were in high school to think that anybody who ever says anything that sounds bad should be punished for it. And so this has gotten to be kind of the what goes on on campus. Now I think there are a lot of students, my guess I hope, the majority of students don’t support that sort of thing, but they’re scared. They’re scared that what happened to this kid at Princeton, that I talked about being just hung out to dry as a racist and a sexist and a fascist in social media and ostracized, they’re afraid of that and they’re scared to speak up and they don’t speak up, by and large, any more than they really have to in class or out of class. It’s very different from say, the Vietnam War debates when I was in college because there were angry debates, but there were two sided debates.

Rich Helppie:
There were and it was over something very specific, the military involvement in Vietnam, what were we doing there, was it a just war and so forth, that was clear cut, not about a comment made 12 years ago or something like that. And I agree with your point about the New York Times, is that we now understand that news audiences are being conditioned to reject facts that don’t fit their narrative. And it just seems to me, there’s a clear linkage with free speech suppression on college campuses. So Stuart, I think about this, would a responsible parent teach their children to speak up or remain silent while attending college?

Stuart Taylor:
That’s a good question and I haven’t really given it much thought, but I’m thinking about it now. I think if your child is vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable, to being ostracized by some people who he wants to like him, or she wants like her, probably if I had a child like that, I would advise them to lay low. Because I think they could just get hurt and it wouldn’t do them any good to fight back because they’d be so outnumbered and because they wouldn’t really be fighting back if they were getting hurt badly. If I had a kid who is like me, I’d say, go right back at them, go right back at them and take them on, take them down. Don’t take any stuff from it, but it depends on what kind of kid it is.

Rich Helppie:
So when we think about trying to pull back from this brink of Stalinist era or Soviet era, or some other type of totalitarian state of must speak and think in a certain way, if indeed, we’re that close to the brink, there are some ideas on where we go from here. And you made mention to the Chicago Principles. Now there’s critics that say is the Chicago Principles just empower hate speech. What are the Chicago Principles and why are they not hate speech? Or why are they not just simply things to protect the privileged and the powerful who just want to shout down everyone else?

Stuart Taylor:
The Chicago Principles, the history-they’re adopted maybe six years ago at the University of Chicago, which is very protective in free speech. Their president, Zimmer, is very protective on free speech and they are very similar to the rules that the United States Supreme Court has laid down for regulating government restrictions on speech. Of course, Princeton University, and a lot of universities aren’t part of the government, all the state universities are, but they have sort of taken that as their model after years of the Supreme Court deciding what should be protected, what shouldn’t. And they’re very, very good rules and they’re very protective by and large. They don’t allow harassment. They don’t allow illegal speech, so incitement of a riot, they wouldn’t allow that. And they don’t allow some other things, but by and large, they’re very protective. Now what about hate speech. In a sense it’s true that they protect hate speech because if a university has a code saying no hate speech, you may think, that means no N words and stuff like that. Well, that’s part of what it means, but it also means no speech that offends anyone who wants to complain and could call it hate speech. Now a lot of very reasonable things people say, it’s called hate speech. And therefore that’s why the Chicago Principles don’t allow a broad restraint on this speech. You have to prove some fairly specific harms, harassment for example, the hate speech complaint, as I think I said earlier, the idea that there’s all this hate speech going on and the Chicago Principles allow it, there isn’t a lot of hate speech going on on campuses. There’s hardly any. A Princeton professor, a math professor who grew up in communist Eastern Europe, wrote an article, a long article, this summer when there was a lot of commotion going on, saying Princeton is one of the least racist major institutions in the world. And he was right. And the same could be said about almost every other university in America.

Rich Helppie:
Well when I think about a place like Princeton, and I didn’t attend there, have been on the campus a few times. You’re looking at a cost for undergraduate per year of over $74,000. You’re looking at an endowment of over $30 billion. Anybody that attends there is fairly privileged, got a lot of rights, don’t think they’re going to be the kind of people to engage in radical behavior-maybe I’m wrong about that. And I understand that Princetonians for Free Speech has this, something called a Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or a FIRE, a rating system.

Stuart Taylor:
FIRE is an acronym for the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education, which is actually founded by two friends of mine at about the turn of the century-I’m old enough for that-by Harvey Silverglate and Alan Charles Kors. And it’s the best civil liberties organization in the country, I think. And you might think, well, what about the American Civil Liberties Union? Well, they’ve become very politically correct, protecting freedom of speech is not really their main business anymore. Protecting left-wing politics is what they’ve drifted to. FIRE, which is run by a fellow who described himself as a liberal Stanford law graduate named Greg Lukianoff, and it has been run by him for a long time, is a mix of conservatives and liberals but certainly not driven by conservative political ideology. It’s driven by, anyone ought to be able to speak freely on campus within the broad boundaries we’re talking about with Chicago Principles, and we will take their side, whether they’re liberal or conservative. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is very liberal, protected Nazis marching in Skokie Illinois years ago, that was hate speech squared. So FIRE, I think, does great work. They have these speech, these ratings of universities, Princeton got a red light rating, which is not a good rating, for example. A few of them get good ratings. And usually over time, one paradox is that the overall ratings of the colleges seem to be getting better over time. Now you might think, well, wait a minute, Stuart, here you are talking about how things are getting worse. And I think the way to put those two principles together is that FIRE and others have put enough pressure on the universities so that they’ve cleaned up their rules pretty well. They don’t adopt speech codes like the way they did back in the nineties and then courts struck them down. But the culture is what really is important in determining how much freedom of speech there is. And this culture has become very inhospitable to free speech at the universities, especially.

Rich Helppie:
When I think about free speech principles and then I look at inclusion goals and the right of everybody to be heard, the right of everybody to not feel threatened, are free speech principles and inclusion goals mutually supporting ideas, or are they opposing thoughts? Is it between those two principles or are they interlocked in some way toward a common goal?

Stuart Taylor:
Thank you. I’m just looking for a quote I wanted to bring up via a friend of mine who one of the great three speech theorists and it kind of states in a paradoxical way my answer to your question. Here’s Jonathan Rouch, my colleague at National Journal. “History shows that the more open the intellectual environment the better minorities will do. Gay people know that we are a progress to freedom of speech and freedom of thought. The best society for minorities is not the society that protects minorities from speech, but the one that protects speech from minorities and from majorities too”. Now I think the truth underlying that, and a lot of other free speech thinking, is that minorities have traditionally been oppressed by people who were destroying the freedom of speech. If somebody spoke out in favor of gay rights in the fifties that person was likely to get clobbered maybe legally, but certainly socially. The civil rights leaders-let me read something by John Lewis, famous civil rights leader, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings”. Frederick Douglas, 1860, the great black anti-slavery crusader before the civil war and after, “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thought and opinions has ceased to exist”. Because the people who want to censor hate speech and so forth, what they call hate speech, in order to protect minorities, don’t realize that-let’s say if somebody like Trump is in power-those powers will be turned against the people they want to protect. And the only way to protect everyone is to protect everyone.

Rich Helppie:
There were some traditional limits and views regarding free speech, the classic example, you can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

Stuart Taylor:
Right, of course that means you can’t fall falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater.

Rich Helppie:
So look, I may not agree with you, but I’ll defend to the death, your right to say it, that it’s okay to disagree, that we don’t need orthodoxy of thought and speech and belief. That it’s okay to have differences. And then you touched on this earlier, but measuring someone’s past against the standard of today, there was a point when we used to say, times were different. Then it doesn’t make what this person did right but it does make it understandable. And we seem to have lost that. And they’re going to tear down statues and eliminate names like Jefferson and Washington and Lincoln.

Stuart Taylor:
They’re going after Lincoln.

Rich Helppie:
That’s a stretch. And we’ve had lots of situations now where people losing their jobs for a minor offense of some decades past. And there’s a time to say, look, I would not have made that same statement today, or having been enlightened I wouldn’t do that. And then one that really troubles me a lot is that there was a time when we were counseled that if you were silent, none would know what one was thinking. Yet now we have this notion, silence is violence. We need to get back to, the silence is maybe just observation.

Stuart Taylor:
One of the more counter intuitive, I think, defense of free speech by philosophers like John Stuart Mill is if all speech is orthodox, if you have to be careful to make sure nobody disagrees with what you say, bad ideas fester beneath all the conversation and they never get confronted. The people who want to say terrible things about race, never say them. And so the people who want to argue against them never get trained at arguing against them. You know, the sunlight is the best disinfectant, that was one way Brandeis put it. And the idea is that it’s better to have more speech than to suppress speech. There will be times, such as when there’s a disinformation campaign going on by Trump supporters and they’re spewing a lot of falsehoods that are actually poisoning the conversation, when it puts some strain on, gee, will good speech drive out bad speech. But by and large, I think it will.

Rich Helppie:
We’re starting to see a creep over into other areas of the country in Congress. You’re seeing some of the young congressional people expressing views that they don’t believe you should be able to argue against. And we’re seeing at the universities and colleges and Williams College is saying, well, free speech really harms people. As you touched on, commenting on a word or a phrase is different than uttering that same word or that phrase. You start getting into K-12 education, the 1619 project, highly controversial and dismissed by academics yet it’s making its way into the curriculum. The state of Illinois coming out with a set of guidelines for their K-12, which are really preaching an orthodoxy. And thankfully, there’s writers that are going against that. I mentioned George Washington, not studying George Washington, understanding how that helps at all. And then reporting free speech as long as the policy of the state are foremost. The dean of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia, which in Columbia was thought for years to be the pinnacle of journalism schools, and-Steve Cole is the gentleman’s name-says those of us in journalism have to come to terms with-and this is a direct quote-the fact that free speech, a principle that we hold sacred is being weaponized against the principles of journalism. And the former managing editor of Time, a guy named Richard Stengel, has written all speech is not equal, where truth cannot drive out lies we have to add new guard rails. In other words, we’re going to suppress speech and you have to live with it. And I think as that falls over into the debates about censorship and the empowerment of big tech, does this cause you concern, and is this something that Princetonians for Free Speech might be taking up?

Stuart Taylor:
Yes, I think the two people you cited, who are very eminent journalists and have accomplished a lot, have lost their way on free speech. I can sort of see how you could, because you can see examples of where were ugly speech has caused ugly results. But I think by and large suppressing ugly speech is not going to be the way to prevent ugly results. I think it’s going to make them worse. And Princetonians for Free Speech will certainly, that would be part of the argument we make when we’re arguing for free speech on campus. There is room for people to disagree about some things. For example, was Trump protected by free speech when he fired up the crowd to invade the Capitol. And there are very complicated Supreme Court rules on incitement of violence. That is, it’s not incitement of violence punishable by criminal law unless it’s directed to producing imminent lawless action and likely to produce imminent lawless action. This is the so-called Brandenburg Rule and Trump’s lawyers are trying to get him the benefit of that. And the counter-argument, which I think is correct, is an impeachment proceeding is a very special kind of proceeding. It’s not a criminal proceeding. If Trump were being prosecuted criminally for incitement of a riot, he would have a right to raise that defense, but an impeachment, the argument is not so much.

Rich Helppie:
And I’m with you on that. And I’ve published and spoken on this a number of times, and to sum it up a reality TV host, shouldn’t really be talking that, a candidate must not be speaking like that, and a president of the United States absolutely should not. It’s a breach of the office and I’m frankly, not to diverge too much from the topic today, but we have a real dilemma in that you can’t let a president be unfettered in the last few weeks of their office holding. And at the same time, impeachment is to remove people from office. And I go back to 1974. If there was the ability to impeach a president who’s left office, would Richard Nixon have resigned? I mean, he resigned to avoid impeachment and if he was going to get impeached anyway, would he have hung in there? I don’t buy the first amendment protection in this case, but on the other hand, I’m not a constitutional lawyer. I’m not a lawyer of any kind. I’m just…

Stuart Taylor:
Well that’s okay, lawyers don’t understand a lot of stuff. A friend of mine named Charles Cooper-Chuck Cooper-who’s been one of the leading conservative lawyers forever in Washington, worked for Ed Meese, worked for conservative administrations, yesterday, I think, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, I think it was, basically saying Trump has no defense based on the fact that he left office. If you look at the language of the constitution, the language about high crimes and misdemeanors, that’s a mandatory [inaudible] language if you take it in context and it doesn’t mean you cannot be impeached if you’ve already left office, it means that if you get impeached and you haven’t already left office it’s a mandatory penalty and an optional, additional penalty is to bar you ever from running for office again. And I think it’s a very persuasive argument. There are arguments on both sides of this and of course have different arguments than the whole free speech argument.

Rich Helppie:
It’s one more divisive issue that we need to contend with. Stuart, I want to talk a little bit about the pandemic and those effects, particularly as it relates to campus free speech. Has there been change to the issues, the thinking, or the theories, or the conduct, regarding free speech since the onset of the pandemic and the resulting policy responses, restricted movement and more online presence and the like?

Stuart Taylor:
Not that I’m aware of in kind of a direct sense. Certainly what has happened is as some voices, irresponsible voices in many cases, have said, oh, you don’t need to wear a mask, don’t worry about that. And then governors say that, and then people go and they have big parties without masks. That’s free speech. And obviously it rubbed some people the wrong way that they’re poisoning the minds of the population with what in many cases is nonsense about an important medical device. People could die because they got the wrong message from Trump and others on that. And that’s a risk, but the risk of the opposite is worse. If that kind of speech were suppressed, it wouldn’t stop. It would circulate on social media. It would circulate on the internet. It would circulate and rumors and people who wanted to hear that kind of thing would still hear it. And they might be more likely to act on it if they think the speech is being suppressed, rather than if they’re hearing an open debate where they can listen to both sides.

Rich Helppie:
Indeed, like the Great Barrington Declaration, they had their Facebook page taken down. Although the writers of that are eminently qualified Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School, Oxford, and they’re reaching a different conclusion. So Stuart, as we look ahead and we wrestle with this issue of free speech, and particularly free speech on campus, are there best policies that could be enacted today to make sure that we don’t suffer from suppression of free speech and yet not miss some of the goals of inclusion and comfort that we do want all of our students to feel?

Stuart Taylor:
That’s very good and a very important question I don’t have a very good answer to, because I’ve been involved in some debates with people about this sort of thing. And one argument that’s made is the states ought to to bar the universities from doing certain things like canceling speakers because they’re conservatives or because there’s going to be a riot. And that gets some purchase. I think the culture is where reform has to be because when you try and legislate reform, legislation, sometimes it backfires. The people you’re going to be putting in charge of administering it are themselves the bureaucrats who have been administering everything that’s gone on so far.
But to get to your last question, how will we know when we’ve succeeded? The idea that we would ever think we’ve succeeded is a nice one and I don’t know that we will. I feel like we’re fighting an uphill battle. I feel like free speech is on the wane in this country and we’re fighting, we’re part of a worthwhile struggle that’s not likely to succeed in the long run. But when we get grandiose in our hopes, we hope that maybe this idea can spread to alumni of colleges around the country, have a national network of free speech organizations, alumni, and also undergraduates have their own networks. Sometimes they do, but they’re very small and they’re beleaguered. And I think the struggle for free speech-we’ll never be past it. And it will always be driven mainly by an anti-free speech culture, by a group that’s dominant in whatever the world is, certainly in the universities that group is the left and it thinks it’s very self-righteous about its convictions, and it’s very happy suppressing any speech that disagrees with that. I think that will always be a problem. And we just need to educate people as best we can as to why that’s not the right answer to the free speech problem.

Rich Helppie:
Well, in essence, the exercise of free speech is the best tonic for the suppression of free speech. I think people are smarter and more open than those that want to suppress believe that they are. Stuart, this has been a great conversation today. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that perhaps we should have discussed?

Stuart Taylor:
I think you covered a lot, and I appreciate it. I think the one thing I haven’t touched on much, I mentioned the New York Times, the free speech-the censorship, the anti-free speech sentiments that start in college, even before college, they don’t go away when people graduate. And so the Democratic party is pervaded by people who are against free speech and a lot of the Republican party too. And the universities are pervaded by it and increasingly the big companies are pervaded by it-Silicon Valley companies for example, the richest companies in the world have a lot of anti-free speech feelings among them and doctrines. And that’s a big part of the danger too. About 20 years ago, in a conversation like this, somebody might’ve said, well, once they get to the real world and they have to hold a job at Google or something like that, why then they’ll see the error of their college ways. Not anymore. These days in the New York Times, Google-there was a guy named James Damore at Google who almost got drummed out of the company with a lot of hate mail going after him for saying something about how maybe the reason women haven’t done as well here in engineering jobs as men have, isn’t just discrimination. Maybe it’s more complicated than that. He got run out of town for saying that, and that’s Google. And Facebook is kind of having internal struggles about this stuff, social media added a whole new dimension to this, because they’re much more powerful than any non-governmental institution in history has ever been in terms of their power to suppress free speech. And we don’t want to leave them to their own devices. I think the law is going to have to come to grips with regulating the social media companies in ways that protect free speech against them, as well as against other people. And that’s going to be a complicated business.

Rich Helppie:
Well, I agree with that. And we have had Professor Dan Crane, University of Michigan, talking about anti-trust and big tech, and other guests, about this. And almost universally everyone believes that the big tech companies, Amazon, Google, in particular, need to be broken up. And frankly, that’s the side that I’m coming down on. Stuart, any closing thoughts for our audience on the Common Bridge?

Stuart Taylor:
I think the kind of discussion we’re having is great and there should be more discussions like this.

Rich Helppie:
What would have been the toughest question I could have asked you?

Stuart Taylor:
Is it a lost cause? Has the sweep of-as the tide against free speech at the universities and in the news media and Hollywood, and in all the high points of American culture, has it gotten so strong that free speech is just going to be swept away or a variant of free speech that they approve of will remain, but the rest of it-will get swept away? That’s the hardest question, because although I’m doing the best I can to push the other way, it feels like an uphill battle.

Rich Helppie:
Well, I feel your struggle, but also I’m encouraged. This is a compassionate and generous country made up of compassionate and generous people. The news media, the entertainment industry, and frankly, our political parties, don’t represent the greatness of the United States and its people. I’ve had the privilege of traveling to all 50 States, having done business in all 50 States, or traveled there otherwise and both, and no matter where you are you find good people who do believe in the country. They’re being told not to, but they’re turning off that voice because inherently I think they know what’s right. So Stuart, right before we sign off here any closing thoughts or words of wisdom or encouragement for our audience?

Stuart Taylor:
Let me just read something Barack Obama said, if I can fall back on that. I think he’s respected by a lot of the anti-free speech people. He made a long eloquent statement about why on campuses, free speech should be greatly protected. It begins more or less like this. The purpose of college is to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world, to help you be more creative. The way to do that is to create a space where a lot of ideas are presented and collide. People are having arguments. People are testing each other’s theories. And he goes on in that vein and it’s a very eloquent statement. I wish every liberal who’s against free speech could read it by a liberal hero.

Rich Helppie:
I concur. And I had occasion to see then President Obama address a graduating class as one of our children was receiving her masters degree. And that was the center part of his talk-if you, and I won’t name the publications, but if you read this publication, also read this one. If you listen to this, also listen here. And he was really encouraging a sampling of a broad array of ideas and perspectives. And I think that successful people like former President Obama and others, whether it’s in business, entertainment, politics, what have you, all understand how important that ability to be different and to speak freely is. I believe that the issues of the day can be solved, the opportunities of the moment can be seized, as long as we’re having these kinds of discussions on the Common Bridge. This is Rich Helppie signing off with our special guest today, Stuart Taylor on the Common Bridge. Stuart, thank you for joining us.

Stuart Taylor:
Thank you for having me.

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