"Freedom of Speech on American Campuses" - Mollie Hemingway

amazing workers and thinkers and they really distinguished themselves in a sea of mediocrity from a lot of other institutions and then also yes so good good work all those don't see these but my my husband and I send our kids to a classical Lutheran school but is also staffed by quite a few Hillsdale graduates and my daughter's fifth grade teacher has been directing her recently in memorizing the entirety of Pericles funeral oration just you know not what a lot of fifth graders are doing and she and one of her classmates recently were encouraged to draw an illustrated children's Odyssey so that the younger students at the school could learn the joys of the Odyssey and then my third grader her teachers also at Hillsdale grad and she has just made Greek mythology so exciting for this third grader and my daughter recently made a board game based on the lives of Greek gods and goddesses and we pay our kids money based on whether they answer jeopardy questions correctly or not and so she is just really doing well in the mythology category and the ten cents each time it's very exciting but I just want to thank you for your support of this institution that has meant so much to my husband and me and and in our work and in our lives and also as I mentioned that went to University of Colorado and I am a native a very proud native of Colorado and I know that many of you here are from Colorado to the extent that when people ask me where I'm from I still say Colorado and I haven't actually lived here in 20 years but I just refused to accept the idea that I'm from anywhere other than Colorado and my parents live in Douglas County and my sisters in Denver and I have a large extended family here so it is so nice to be in beautiful Colorado and I hope you all appreciate the beautiful place that you get to live as well a little different in Virginia and also a pretty place but no mountains and none of the none of the lifestyle and beauty that you all have here so okay on Monday night I was on special report TV is not my natural medium as you probably can figure out I prefer to write and breaking news is a particularly stressful situation I like to think about what I'm gonna say and then write it out and then rewrite what I'm gonna say well on Monday that was when the special counsel referred some wrongdoing to a local FBI branch and they raided the president's personal attorney's offices home and a hotel room to seize all those things and we were being asked to respond to it in real time and I had this I was actually having a lot of fun with it because this is one of those stories that I have been following quite a bit I have very different thoughts on everything than most people in DC about this larger story it was fun to respond but it was also just so surreal you know we were watching the president speak about the violation of civil liberties and what a disgrace it is that's going on and I almost felt like I was outside myself understanding this is a really serious moment in time and it's really just so surreal to have a president who just says what's on his mind for better for worse he just says what's on his mind and he just sort of says things that you don't expect a politician to say but what's weird about the moment is also that we have a media that distorts what's happening and that also contributes to these feelings of Surrealism that I think a lot of people are experiencing they sort of see what's going on with their own eyes and then they listen to a media distort and contextualize things in a way that doesn't match with reality so I was reading story about Chuck Todd in Politico recently and it was built around how the president had used very intemperate rhetoric to personally attack him calling him a son of us something and Chuck Todd had this quote that just stuck with me he said our credibility is being challenged now by the President and maybe it's a tactic maybe it's the same old same old but one of their strongest arrows in their quiver is the media's coverage of the Iraq war and so we can't afford to get a big story wrong basically twice in a decade twice in I guess a generation he went on the collective press cores coverage of Vietnam and Watergate gave the media its credibility an interesting perspective I don't know you know he said if we blow this moment it could be something that will pay a price for for a generation and I'm sitting there thinking yes Chuck Todd that would be very bad for your credibility if you blew a really big story such as oh I don't know the entire 2016 campaign and election that would be really bad and to like pretend like that didn't happen and to pretend that people didn't notice what was going on I mean how many times did was there's this media consensus about what was going on that didn't match with reality as evidenced by the result of the election but even if the election hadn't gone that way it would have been just as true that the media were telling a false story because it was a clean it was a close enough election that they could have sort of gotten away with it but rather than responding to that humiliating and discrediting coverage of 2016 with a genuine admission of guilt a return to fact-based reporting as opposed to narrative pushing and making systemic changes to improve diversity and newsrooms newsrooms responded instead by getting worse and it's really weird you'd think you go through an event like that you have no option but to admit you need to fix some things and instead we've seen media get just more unhinged and more history ricky'll yesterday a media reporter at CNN was bragging about the chyron of the day at CNN so Chiron is like at the very bottom of the screen on your TV it's like a caption or something that describes what's going on and yeah and so like in recent years CNN has taken to just using that Chiron to attack Republicans and mostly actually just Trump to attack Trump so they'll say Donald Trump said something and that's a lie you know and they put it in the chyron and it would be one thing I mean I don't think people think of Donald Trump is the most precise read rotation so it would be one thing if they were doing that across the board like if you like your health care plan you can keep your health care plan and that's a lie you know it'd be one thing if they were doing it for everybody of all politicians but they just do it mostly with Trump and Republicans but the one yesterday said Trump's anger over raid surpasses previous tantrums that's a really mature chyron that you should brag about putting on your media outlet Emmys weird because CNN I think used to be thought of as a media outlet that at least aimed toward objectivity and aimed to have a sort of calm sense about it and they chose to throw that away I don't know how that's working out for them but this was a reference this supposed tantrum was a reference to Trump not taking kindly to an out-of-control FBI and Department of Justice rating the offices of his personal attorney as you might imagine might not go over well with people particularly because attorney-client communications which are privileged were seized that's a serious issue but our media aren't really interested in exploring those serious issues instead of they just want to do point scoring against Republicans and Trump in particular Alan Dershowitz who I think has been an admirable exception to a lot of this is a genuine liberal who actually believed what he was saying for many years and has been raising concerns about these investigations that don't have a strong legal basis and he said yesterday and a piece he published many civil libertarians have remained silent about potential violations of president Trump's rights because they strongly disapprove of him and his policies that is a serious mistake because these violations establish precedents that lie around like loaded guns capable of being aimed at other targets it doesn't take a huge intellect to realize if they can do this to the president they can do it to you but we have a one-sided media environment that seems to me to be getting worse every day conservative and constitutional viewpoints are throttled while progressive viewpoints are amplified and coordinated a couple of weeks ago one of my colleagues at Fox critiqued one of the children that is being used by anti-gun activists to attack gun rights she issued an unnecessary tweet she quickly apologized for her intemperance in a genuine way but it didn't matter the gun the people who opposed gun rights refused the apology and they pressured companies to stop advertising on her show now in an adult world children telling corporations to bully people for wrong think would be dismissed as ridiculous but in our world the corporation's quickly succumbed it's a very reminiscent of what happened just a few weeks prior when Delta Airlines responded to bullying by attacking NRA members and removing a benefit in the very grand display of virtue signaling and all of this you know I think people really need to think about what these stories have in common which is what actually happened is there was a horrific shooting in Florida were literally dozens of times federal state and local authorities were warned about someone who they thought was a problem and it wasn't even sometimes the warnings were like we think this person is violent and a problem sometimes the warnings were as specific as this person with this name is going to shoot up this school with this name I mean you can't get a more specific warning than that and for some reason the agreed upon response by many people in the media was that the fault lied with NRA members and that the response to massive catastrophic government to defend its citizens should be a removing of rights of self-defense that's insane that makes no sense at all and yet it's actually what you see in most media coverage of what's going on yesterday and today I guess we were mentioning Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook was testifying on the hill and most of the questions were as Cheryl pointed out from grandstanding senators with limited knowledge of Facebook or how it works but I did like the line of questioning from two senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Ben Sasse of Nebraska who asked important questions about how Facebook defines safe speech and unsafe speech and how they understand their role in protecting free speech and how they have a one-sided crusade regarding speech the senators pointed out how conservative viewpoints are routinely silenced while leftist viewpoints are amplified and never silenced Twitter's CEO and Twitter is this you know huge social media platform where a lot of ideas are spread and disseminated and where a lot of the bullying takes place the corporations that respond to the bullying by removing advertising are usually just pressured on Twitter so it's an important medium even if not a lot of people are on there so the CEO of Twitter linked approvingly to a threatening article about how the left should just model itself in total after California's left and just destroy the right compromises over the right simply must be destroyed and silenced which is a threatening thing free social media CEO to say hey check this article out it's really a good read when you're not in his in his viewpoint despite their numbers the strength of their arguments and their political power conservatism is struggling because every institution in America is making it difficult to get the message out they distort what we say they apply double standards and frequently just silencing conservatives is the easiest way to deal with us it's much harder to engage arguments so when we think about how we got here I think people rightly understand that a lot of this happens as a result of what's happening in academia but I also get a little frustrated when people say like how did things happen like this I was talking with my dear colleague Charles Krauthammer many months ago who was saying that you know he's been in the Punda tree business for a really long time and he's always been predicting doom and gloom if conservative values are not upheld he said after a while he was wondering if maybe he wasn't being melodramatic because it seemed like the country was doing fine and was wealthy healthy people seem to be largely content and in recent years he'd come to realize that in fact he had been right that failure to uphold conservative values was having a serious problem for the culture and that many of the predictions he'd made about moral rot were in fact coming true I think conservatives should have far more confidence in their predictive powers frequently and conservatives predict some bad affect will come about with a change in policy you can think of thousands of these examples but think about how there were changes to welfare benefits decades ago we're coming from a good place people thought that it was unfair that women couldn't get welfare benefits for them and their children unless they were married so they removed the requirement that merit that you should be married if you're getting welfare benefits for your family and conservatives said they understand why you would do that but it might actually result in worse problems if the father is no longer considered integral to a family and he can just kind of check out of course you can imagine what the response was to this line of argument you people are evil bigoted racist is there nothing you wouldn't do to hurt poor people and progressives won the day now of course we know that not only were the Conservatives right they were they were more right than they even knew the situation in terms of family disintegration among lower classes is horrifically bad not having fathers involved in in the raising of children is causing serious problems for young for young boys and girls and we have now decades of data to show this but there are no apologies offered for all those slurs that were hurled at conservatives but never mind my point is conservatives should have more confidence in their predictions and for decades conservatives have been more about the decline of education in government primary schools as well as in academia they said it was causing serious problems turning away from true education and adoption of many progressive ideas some have been warning about this at least since the 60s and then they act surprised when they see what's happening on college campuses and it is a bad situation right now and I think it's worth going over a little bit of it over 90% of America's top colleges regulate campus free speech one-third employs severely restrictive policies according to fire the foundation for individual rights and education that monitors this so one of the main ways that this can happen even is through policing of what are called micro aggressions this is where you say something nice but the ID argument is that you're actually being racist or sexist so if you say I'm impressed that you're majoring in economics to a woman like myself who majored in economics that might be sexist because you're implying women can't handle the math that's silly but at least you kind of understand where what the thinking is there other examples are far less defensible like if you say America is a land of opportunity that could be very hurtful to someone who hasn't made it to the top 1% of America and supposedly this you know marginalizes people who haven't had the same success as elites the idea is completely out of control and infecting the larger popular culture this week there was a big brouhaha about The Simpsons which is a show I don't watch but my husband I believe has every episode memorized and there is a character appoo who in my limited viewing I believe it's the far and away the best character on The Simpsons he runs the convenience store he is fundamentally decent and honest and hard-working and nice but a comedian just put out a documentary saying that he's problematic because he reinforces stereotypes about South Indian immigrants to the United States which I would think what is the stereotype that they're awesome because op who is so awesome in this show but people really decided that this was a real serious problem for The Simpsons The Simpsons to their credit responded in their TV show by dismissing the criticism which itself then was problematic because they're supposed to know you're always supposed to respond to people with hurt feelings by kick by catering to those hurt feelings and they declined to do that but back on campus a new night Gallup poll shows that 30% of college students favored outright censorship of politically incorrect views 30% is bad but it's really bad when you realize that it was just 22% 8 years ago I'm sorry just 22% two years ago the William F Buckley program at Yale recently commissioned a survey about attitudes toward free speech on campus they interviewed 800 students all across the country and they showed that by a margin of 51 percent to 36 percent students favor their school having speech codes to regulate speech for students and faculty 63% favored requiring professors to employ trigger warnings to alert students to material that might be discomforting and you know I I think that um you know you're familiar with trigger warnings and when it's discussed it for people who have legitimate post-traumatic stress disorder which usually arises from actual trauma like serving in a war and seeing something really horrific and then struggling upon your return to a non war Society and you can even argue that to some extent PTSD as diagnosed in the military is itself overly diagnosed but the idea that being a freshman at Swarthmore requires a trigger warning no matter how horrendous you think colleges are I think that's a ridiculous claim to make and one-third of students polled could not identify the first amendment as the part of the Constitution that dealt with free speech thirty-five percent said that the First Amendment does not protect something they call hate speech while thirty percent of self-identified liberal students said the First Amendment is itself outdated it's not a good situation so it's a regular case to hear about conservatives many of whom aren't even really that conservative getting shouted down when trying to give a speech at a campus and administration's aren't really doing much to protect these speakers protect the rights of students who want to listen to these speakers not really doing much at all with a few notable exceptions how much to note I get invited to speak at college campuses and I have yet to be yelled at and I feel like I'm doing something really wrong so I'm gonna work on that see what I can do to improve the situation but but I think people need to focus on the bigger picture you know free speech isn't the end of itself it exists for a much bigger more important reason and it's about intellectual freedom and the right of many of the right of man to seek truth and when you look at our First Amendment the one that 30 percent of college students can't identify what's in it it looks at so many of the freedoms necessary for man to pursue and identify truth it is difficult to determine truth and we would need the freedom of the press freedom of speech and most importantly freedom of religion in order to pursue truth the founders knew that was so important that this was built in at the very beginning and a turn away from that very much hurts intellectual freedom I was reading one scholar who put it well shouting down a speaker Rob's listeners of the opportunity to hear and learn and Rob's the speaker of his own speech a central reason to value open debate is its capacity to show us the truth even if only by voicing errors that make the truth easier to apprehend free speech is central to political and moral reasoning in which citizens express their conclusions and weigh them against competing claims if you believe in self-government you need free speech for an informed populace that makes wise and Prudential decisions and that does mean that provocative and controversial thinkers need space to express themselves and to be spoken against when you look at the progressive agenda which is for many about elite bureaucratic control of the people control of the means of determining truth is key for advancing their agenda keeping people from being able to practice their religion for real is key to the progressive agenda limiting the press such as we saw with that citizens united battle where the government tried to keep people from publishing negative information about Hillary Clinton I think people forget the Citizens United ruling was really about whether you had the right to publish critical information a critique of Hillary Clinton prior to an election in which she was running for office and the government argued that you should not have the right to do that which is just amazing and of course limiting discourse that we see in the culture is all part of this same task I mentioned about the time that we spent at Hillsdale and when I first arrived on campus John Miller who heads the journalism program was giving me a tour and I asked him to explain to me a little bit about the dress code that students are required to follow and he said what are you talking about and you know I coming from University of Colorado where I remember one of my fellow students won a contest the contest was can you wear the same outfit every day he could it was really disgusting by the end of the year sorry every day for it for a full year and he did it he was wearing like really nasty shorts and a sweatshirt and he wore them every day for a year so when I think of college dress code that was more my experience and Here I am on Hillsdale and the girls are wearing these lovely dresses and pumps and the men are wearing suit jackets and they're all just so adult like and John Miller explained to me that there is no dress code at Hillsdale they do that voluntarily and I think it shows something very important about the students at Hillsdale and how they are treated and it relates to how they read before you before you discuss things with them in class just they're not infantilized like so many students that so many colleges are you know when all that talk about microaggressions safe spaces acquiescence to feelings it isn't just the university's fault by the way it's also a result of the decline of family size and the resultant helicopter parenting that we've witnessed in recent decades this these bubbles of protection for students if you treat students like children they'll act accordingly and they do you probably heard the story a couple years ago about how some office at university Yale University's intercultural Affairs Committee put out a memo asking people not to wear offensive Halloween costumes you know don't dress up as a Native American you might offend a Native American don't dress up as a pirate you know how pirates get they're very sensitive and so and this Yale faculty member named Erica Christakis sent an email in response which said have we lost faith in young people's capacity in your capacity to exercise self censure through social norming and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you it's a good question she meant it actually rhetorically but it turned out that they had lost faith in young people's capacity and she and her husband who are both working at the University were bullied she ended up being forced out of her job the University did not punish the students who were screaming at her and her husband or bullying them they in fact responded by allocating fifty million dollars in diversity training or something to that effect and my favorite thing is that Erica Christakis was a was called a housemaster which is like a leadership position at Yale they've renamed the Masters because they of course as you know clearly it's a racist term unless you know Latin even a little bit of Latin where master comes from Magister meaning teacher so they really showed the Latin people who's boss there and of course nobody knows Latin so the only possible explanation for I you'd be called a master is racism so they've changed it to something else I don't know what they changed it to but that was the actual response from Yale when the response should have been exactly the opposite there is some evidence that this isn't working out as well for universities as many in the media suggests it does my husband Mark Hemingway has written a lot about the protests at the University of Missouri that broke out in 2015 they were originally related to black lives matter but then they became mostly about administration at the University of Missouri and worker benefits there were hunger strikes the footballs team struck or they did a the football team did a boycott they a professor was caught on video encouraging violence against media that were covering the protests literally and the Chancellor of Mizzou resigned the president of the entire University of Missouri system also resigned Spike Lee made a film about it but it turns out that the way that people responded the people in the real world responded to the University of Missouri is that they received your they expect to an increase in enrollment instead they got a fifteen hundred student drop in enrollment for the next year they had to close for dorms the next year they by the end of the year's enrollment was down 6.1 percent from the previous year they were projecting a seven point four percent drop the next year and it's just getting worse they had to cut 55 million dollars out of their budget to make up for the tuition shortfall which they also responded to by increasing tuition suggests they maybe need to learn a little bit about supply and demand but universities have stopped teaching economics in any way that makes sense a long time ago so they can be forgiven for this error I guess but considering that the initial protests were about worker benefits it's also worth noting that they had to layoff four hundred university employees which is not also bad because as I think we know a lot of administration's are so bloated administrative Lea they have over 13,000 full-time employees at Missouri one for every two students or a little bit more than two students of the next fall this other professor William deressa which wrote a piece for the American scholar about teaching in a woman's school recently where speech was stifled he begins his piece by talking about a young student who says she quickly figured out she had to hide her Christianity from students and faculty and it really got him thinking about the climate at liberal universities at one point he notes that the schools are really religious institutions you know not Methodist or Catholic but that they are designed to protect the religion of the elite sort of a religion of success and he says the link with political correctness which isn't a natural link to that to that religious value of success is a fig leaf to cover this sort of competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism which worships individual success above all so this political correctness ideology provides a moral cover beneath which undergraduates can prosecute their careerist projects undisturbed he says between that groupthink and the radical individualistic success plan follows the actual core purpose of liberal education that's what falls away inquiry into the fundamental human questions undertaken through rational discourse which you don't get to do with the us talk of PC consensus which is not about argument or the them talk of by two pourous rage which dominates most of our media and social media so lost in this new higher education religion is inquiry into the fundamental human questions what shall we do and how shall we live those questions threaten the radical individual success religion and its values and they threatened the certain confident orthodoxy of political correctness the core purpose of a liberal education he says raises the possibility that there are different ways to think and that is threatening to the progressive agenda seems well put there are various ways to respond a lot of conservatives have put a lot of thought into this Stanley curse writes about the free speech problem on campus and I was reading a piece of his where he talked about his game plan for what to do which is colleges and universities ought to adopt a policy on freedom of expression then they need to systematically educate members of their faculty to make sure that they understand these principles and then they have a responsibility for assuring free expressions they need to be held accountable when these things fail you know and so on and so forth but I'm also a bit frustrated by how long it can take some conservatives to wake up to the reality and the the seriousness of what is going on they know academia is a disaster but people keep sending their kids to the same schools without giving them the tools before that that they need to survive and thrive at those schools last week there was a small story that I still think was significant in Washington DC the Atlantic Monthly claims to not be partisan and to have no quick it's not actually true but that's what they had been claiming up until last week it has really no conservatives it has two people it tries to claim are conservative who occasionally wade into conservative like the Outer Banks of a conservative ideology David Frum and an another guy there but they hired Kevin Williamson who had who had left the national would left National Review to go work with them he's a belligerent trump critic but conservative and pro-life and they fired him days later after a internal mob and external mob demanded it and their cowardly editor Jeffrey Goldberg acquiesced by the way I was in Jeffrey Goldberg's offices he's a very nice guy and I was so impressed he had this picture he had a Charlie Hebdo poster in his office and the idea is that he is someone who would withstand even threats of Islamist violence in defense of freedom of the press and he couldn't even take a few days of Planned Parenthood bullying so I really hope that he had the very least has taken down the poster at the Charlie Hebdo poster just for his own Integrity's for his own sake but the got rid of Kevin Williamson and it was in this conned texts that the Twitter CEO pushed out that article about the left crushing the right they have this idea there is no need to debate or seek the truth or even compromise just crush the opposition and move on and that is where we are now and it's awful and I think we should stop pretending it's not that bad which is top pretending it's acceptable and as bad as things are now yes okay great as bad as things are now people even 10 to 20 years ago things were kind of bad on campus then too but they were far more amenable to free speech at that time so the decline is happening quickly I keep thinking what's gonna happen in 10 years when people come out of an of a climate in ten years they they get control of all these institutions it is going to be insanely awful even by today's standards my colleague at the Federalist Ben Dominick wrote about this last week saying consider the major hires the Washington Post New York Times and the network's have made since the 2016 election the editions overwhelmingly haven't been Trump fans they have been different critics of the president and the administration occasionally from a slightly more rightward position Kevin Williamson was consistent with this the point is that the audience for all their errors about the diversity of viewpoints and how that's important really just once their existing views re expressed to them in different forms and by different voices if you get through the diversity veneer you'll find the same rule no wrong think can be tolerated to these religious institutions of colleges and the media constitutionalists and conservatives are abject heretics and they treat us as such it is time to stop trying to pretend that they are open to discourse or that working with them is where you become like the one token person at their institution will effect the change that is necessary for the Republic for those with views placing them on the right the only way to win in my view is to not play this game anymore the only way to win is to build up our own platforms and institutions our own hills dales our own TV shows our own publications that's why my publication the Federalists exists that's why Hillsdale exists and I hope you all commit to recognizing the seriousness of the ahead of us and the work needed to save the Republic and her values and I'm very glad to be working with you all on this Thank You mrs. Hemingway we now have time for a few questions please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to be brought to you hi Bill Dedmon Jordan Peterson has come into the news lately with regard to a lot of the things you're addressing I wonder if you have some comments on him so I am reading through his book the 12 rules for living as I what it's called right now and I'm enjoying it I'm not I'm not like a complete fan of him in large part because I myself am a Christian and I don't love his approach to Christianity but I find him a really fun and provocative thinker to study and I think what's interesting about him also is that he is having people are responding to him and are being forced to respond to him because he's such a heretic heretics or dissidents can be really effective for influencing discourse and he comes from liberal academic environment he has just through the course of his studies and his practices come to realize there are serious problems about the limits of free expression and how they threaten the survival of a free society so I actually do think he's worth reading not reading uncritically but I think he is making an impact for a reason which is that he's forcing some questions that people have to take seriously and boy do people find him frustrating on the left which also can be but they but they're sort of forced to engage with him and at least talk about where they don't like him and that's a very helpful thing as well my question is how can we consumers pushback when we see the news media make egregious mistakes like on the nightly news it's either sins of omission or Commission or both I used to live in Chicago and I wrote dick Durbin because I didn't he didn't care what I said but his 20-something interns might have learned something so should I take any time and write NBC CBS all these guys and say hey guys you blew it or does it really not matter cuz they make money cuz they'll let people support their advertisers I'm not sure if I know the answer to the question but I do think there is value in in responding to false news that you see from media outlets and I recommend doing it like if people receive no pushback there they're existing in a lot of echo chambers where everybody affirms for them that the way they view things is correct and when someone pierces through that bubble it can be very effective and I also think it's important when you're doing that that you speak nicely and you don't allow them to tune you out because I think it's very frustrating and I sometimes get filled with rage sometimes i watch things I'm like this is the worst thing I've ever seen and I'm so angry but before I write the note to the reporter and say so by the way when you have made this factually incorrect statement I would try and calm down so that I don't just say what's actually what I'm actually feeling but I do think it's important for the bubble reason to remind people that the carefully curated home that they have made for themselves is not representative of the real world and that is a good service you can provide to your neighbors and journalists might be really frustrating but they're still your neighbors so my name is Mark Sabin I'd like to ask you a question that goes back to what cheryl atkinson said in her talk this morning and she talked about the curator hers and the question of the corporations controlling speech there is now a law pending I believe it's in California where they now want to have a governmental II developed sponsored control curator and forced media to go through that control process to guarantee and determine what will be released or not as I tell you your thoughts on the UCM I think this is something that people on the right need to really monitor and be careful about one thing that was interesting I loved that she was giving this history of fake news and it was so weird in the aftermath of the election I anyone has to acknowledge that was a surprising election result even for people like me who predicted it I was still surprised because I'd kind of lost the confidence in my prediction at the end but the way that people ran to this idea of fake news it was so disorienting like of course that's not a real thing that caused the election of Donald Trump but they're all pretending like it is so what was their real game plan and I think it does come down to control of information and the idea that if you can judge the you know the right news as real news and the wrong thing as fake news you get to control the information that people receive and control of information is the way that totalitarian systems control the people and it sounds dramatic but it's obviously happening in social media and I think we're going to quickly see that it that we are not well positioned to fight against it and that conservatives have frequently had this idea that the only problem of censorship is if it comes from the government and certainly governmental censorship is a serious problem that's not the only way censorship can happen and they need to be aware of what systems they participate in that limit expression and limit information and I think part of that should be about how when we get our news we make sure that we are getting it from a good variety of sources that we're seeking out and not just responding to what corporations have decided is okay and that does take more work and also maybe less this is total argument against interest because I run an online publication but less information gathering online and more about being getting your education through books printed publication and the like but it's something that people really need to be aware of that there can be serious problems of censorship that exist outside of a government governmental system hi fred bhature from Colorado and just wondering you talked a lot about culture and the cultural rot and things that are going on and and you know just living through the decades you see things make it downturn and all that do you think that at some point there's going to be a there's going to have to be a crisis point to make to bring things back or do you believe that that you know through starting your own publications or institutions you can make a gradual shift back to the middle and or something like that do you think that's possible or we're gonna have to go through some kind of blood blood thing I know by the way is Laura Ingraham is she gonna make it and I'm very proud of her and the company for not like letting the bullies determine content I think that's a really dangerous path to go down and I hope I would like to see actually all media figures whether they're on left or right think through a little bit about corporate bullying and whether that's something that is such a good idea in the long run so I think that it's a bit of an optimistic idea to think that a crisis point might arrive and it's too optimistic for two reasons one it might never arrive and also you don't know how things will actually go if a crisis comes along so there's it's I mean I think you can feel it in the air that there's some domestic conflict and there's international conflict and certainly if something big happened there all bets are off in terms of what happens in the future and hopefully what you should always be doing also in light of this because you never know when conflict will come is preparing for how to handle your way through conflict and how to make things better at the other side of that conflict but because it might not happen and because it might not go the way that you like of course the thing to do is to build up the institution's what I'm what I'm a little frustrated by is how much people want to believe that the left is open to conservative viewpoints or open to conservative ideas and they keep on trying to persuade and I think that how many decades do these institutions have to tell you they're not interested before you realize like maybe this isn't the way to and why having strong institutions are so important and because these other institutions on the left the media and academia are actually pretty weak it is a great moment to build up institutions on the right and we can learn from what they did well and avoid their errors so I think that's far and away the best plan well I'm bill Crowe from Colorado and as a new member of the Molly Hemingway fan club I'd like to ask you to put your crystal ball ring your crystal ball out and tell us what you think about the midterms coming up almost tomorrow so one of my one of my things I do is I don't make predictions unless I really have a strong idea about it it's very frustrating to be on special report because bret baier loves to surprise you with a quick question about what your prediction is about something that's going to happen now when I make predictions I'm actually pretty good I mentioned that I was one of the I was and this was not a common view out in DC I thought Donald Trump would win the election and I made that prediction in January of 2016 before he won the primary I had a good understanding of that situation with the midterms I think people I think people on the right are very right to be concerned and I think that they have I don't think that Republican elected officials have done a good job of managing the last year and a half I don't think they've given enough victories to excite the base and I think that they've also just done some really stupid stuff like a 1.3 trillion dollar spending bill kind of makes you wonder why you're voting for a Republican if they're going to do this anyway and failure to push back against some progressive advancements which is not to say and people can get really down on Congress they've actually done a lot of really good stuff too and you know Mitch McConnell has handled judicial nominations very well and he'd handled them well going back into into the when Scalia died which I don't think people really got for his plan that he would not hold hearings on any nominee and people lost their minds and he was like maybe you didn't hear me we're not having hearings on the nominee and they'd come up with all these reasons why you had to and he was like oh I'm sorry did you not hear me no hearings like it's not going to happen and that was one of the most important decisions that brought the presidency to Republicans and he does not get enough credit for that so I think people can get a little they'd love to critique Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell it's a very difficult caucus to manage there is there aren't really good numbers there so what if you care about that party what you should do is build up the numbers to give them some ability to actually push through legislation but I think instead what's happened is they played it too safe people are demoralized and to say that the left is exuberant is a huge understatement like all they've known since November 9 2016 2016 was what they would be doing at the midterms and they are very motivated and highly funded so I think it's reasonable to worry about it having said that people always make predictions early on and there can be a turn of events that lead to wildly different calculus on the eve of an election including a crisis point a you know a war with North Korea or something else you know that causes people to sort of reorder what is their biggest incentive or what they're looking to do so that was a really long way to say I don't know sorry I'm Lewis house from Louisville Colorado oh and for those who are not Coloradoans it's not okay question it's great Italian food there there are many organizations that claim to be fact checkers no the question is are there any that are legitimate and even balanced and in particular I'm interested in one call I think it's pro política do you have comments on that Pro Publica okay I think what's interesting about the entire fact-checking genre is that it really arose out of liberal frustration that somehow George W Bush got elected again when they were like but we've told people he's a bad guy why did they not listen and any day this was the early version of fake news oh they believed things were real when really we all know that George Bush is the worst liar in the history of all Liars and they wonder why their rhetoric against Donald Trump doesn't go over so well but they built up this fact-checking Empire based on their frustration that people were voting Republican and I think it shows fact checks always go against Republicans the fact check opinion instead of facts so they'll be frustrated that someone has an opinion that differs from them and they will say oh technically it's true that the tax code is longer than the Bible as Ted Cruz or someone said but if you think about it in a different way that's not really the way to put it well that's not a fact check that's not that's whatever that is that's not a fact check and so they struggle with their own limitations that were cooked in at the beginning oh wait I have to mention one of my favorite ones is they rated Carly Fiorina a liar because she published a book called from secretary to CEO but did you know that she didn't go straight from secretary to CEO so she's a liar and I think that the entire enterprise is rotten that's my own personal bias wait one more example is that they raided in 2013 bill or Barack Obama's claim that if you like your health care plan you can keep it they rated that lie of the year and people say well see look they go after Democrats but they fail to mention is that PolitiFact judged that statement true six times during the actual time it mattered when people were voting based on these things and then many years later they said oh it turned out that was a lot it turned out that wasn't true but they had given credibility to the statement when it mattered only to backtrack later so there is a new site actually we just talked about it on media buzz on Sunday that analyzes fact checks and just kind of compares like are they actually checking facts are they checking opinions or another favorite of mine are they checking predictions you cannot fact check a prediction because it's in the future and looking at whether their sources for something are credible or not and how they go about their business but just per my own personal view is I don't I just fundamentally reject the entire premise of fact-checking other people might get more value out of them we have time for one more question no pressure but it should be a good question Thank You Molly my name is John young I'm from Littleton Colorado I wonder if you could comment and what things we can do as citizens to fight back against speech and the college campuses so I actually think that what's most important is in your own life to cultivate an embrace of free expression and I thought about this with the there was a story a few years ago with Brendan Eich who was the CEO of Mozilla and he'd given a small amount of money to a campaign to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman and he lost his job which was not just his job he founded the company and he was forced out and because he refused to recant and how easy would it have been with his empire to say oh I shouldn't have done that or I'm sorry I didn't realize I was hurting feelings or something he refused to recant he didn't say anything about it but he just refused to do what you were supposed to do I found this to be one of the most inspirational moments of the last decade people responded to it by you know it like a lot of pundits said good he got fired that's just the market doing its work that would be sort of a liberal viewpoint and libertarians said or that was a libertarian viewpoint the Liberals said he should have been fired he had the wrong ideas and even like a lot of conservatives said well you should have the right to be wrong but he was actually fired for being right he was fired for saying something true and his refusal to recant reminded me I was actually just mentioning this at lunch Vaslav Havel has an essay called power of the powerless I think it's called it's colloquially referred to as the greengrocer essay because he talks about how people put up signs and communist systems where they say workers of the world unite nobody even knows what it means but they know they're supposed to put the sign up and it keeps the people above them happy and knows they can trust them and it keeps the people below them confident that they can deal with them and if someone refuses to put the sign in it really disrupts the system and so I think that a lot of what's happened at universities has happened because we ourselves self-censored and we were afraid to say true things and we care a lot about not offending people which is a good virtue to be polite but what we have lost is the fight for truth and I think in our own interactions with our family members our neighbors and our colleagues we need to make sure that we aren't losing that very American embrace of free expression and that we also react with happiness to other people practicing that even when we disagree with them that we take the time to argue with them and that we reinstall these values as a culture and I think that would be the best thing we could do and if you can't do that if you are if that's not your gift I do think it's important to support those people that are doing it and to make sure that those institutions and people who are out there publicly do get your support which is good to do even if you're doing this on your own too but that's what that's my best advice for what to do Thanks [Applause]

Channel: Hillsdale College

Views: 40,716

Rating: 4.8852773 out of 5

Keywords: Hillsdale College, National Leadership Seminar, Mollie Hemingway, Freedom of Speech, Free Speech on College Campuses, American Greatness

Id: oc6pHgYHEfU

Length: 52min 41sec (3161 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018