Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel Speaks on the Intimidation Game

ladies and gentlemen before we begin I just want to make a quick announcement about the question-and-answer session that will be holding kind of at the end of this talk so if you could just hold your questions until then somebody will be walking around with the microphone and they'd be happy to make sure your questions heard up here because it's kind of difficult to to hear from up here on stage but really before we begin I'd like to take a quick moment to thank a couple of people first the Manhattan Institute this country's most important Arabic urban public policy think tank and the Alexander Hamilton Institute for making this event possible I'd also like to thank we'll each Snyder class of 2019 as well as Hamilton alumnus Dean Ball for their dedication in organizing the event so as a representative of the Hamilton College Republicans and the Alexander Hamilton Institute's undergraduate fellows it is my distinct honor to present to you today Kimberly's wrassle a senior member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board and it's Potomac watch columnist miss frazil holds a BA in public policy and international affairs from Princeton University she has won numerous awards for general aesthetics excellence including in 2014 the prestigious Bradley prize in bestowing the award Bradley Foundation President Michael grebe lauded mr. Russell saying quote her keen focus on government transparency and accountability as well as her important analyses on issues of the day strengthen the American fabric and quote figures from across the political spectrum have faced miss rasuls potent analytical fire in recent years miss Russell has focused on the threats to the First Amendment in her new book the intimidation game how the left is silencing free speech she chronicles masterfully this campaign of retribution and the threats against conservatives all in the name of good governance extremists have harassed scared and shamed their political opponents of speaking or acting and perhaps more pertinent to those here with us today college campuses have fallen victim to left-wing attempts to suppress free speech as a result college students across the nation and even here at Hamilton who do not necessarily share the so-called progressive agenda have had to censor themselves in order to survive inside and outside the classroom we've had our publications destroyed we've been belittled we've been harass both physically and verbally we've been shamed out of classes by both our peers and our professors almost none of whom we could call conservative we can no longer participate in debates or discussions for fear of being ridiculed and the list goes on thus many of us here today are really excited for the opportunity to hear miss Russell's diagnosis of the problems and look forward to discussing both her book and the issues of free speech at the IHI following this lecture so please join me in welcoming Kimberly Russell [Applause] good evening and thank you for that lovely introduction it's always very embarrassing to me when people talk about anything I've done it's much easier to live at home with my children who think I'm dirt so I want to thank the Alexander Hamilton Institute in the Manhattan Institute for having me come up here also Hamilton for hosting me here I have never actually been here before so this was an exciting new adventure for me in addition to everything else so I do have three kids by the way and I like to tell this story when I begin this speech because I think it's very illustrative of some of the issues that we face out there but my children are 12 9 and 5 and they are much like every other child in the world and that they exist to annoy the hell out of each other and they do a very good job of it and a couple of months ago they were all sitting at the kitchen table and the 12 year old was doing a particularly good job of this with the 5 year old just annoying her annoying her until I thought her head was gonna spin off and at one point she just turned to him and she said Oliver you need to stop talking forever and this incited a argument across the table Oliver is yelling I have free speech rights you can't tell me not to talk and they're all fighting back and forth no you don't yes you do so in an attempt to establish some order mom said how about we go around the table and you tell me what you think free speech is so we do this and the 12 euros goes first he's my academic my scholar my studious one and he just gives this textbook answer you know first amendment Madison Congress shall make no law but by the way certain exceptions for public safety and libel I was a cook you might actually be smart enough to go to Hamilton one day we get to the middle child she's 9 she's my rebel she thinks that nobody ever listens to her pay attention to her cuz she's the middle child and so she has an answer she as well no I don't even know what libel or public safety is but you know what there should be no rules on free speech anytime anywhere against anyone anyone should be allowed to say anything they want any time and by the way you should all start by listening more to me so that's the the nine year old and then finally it comes around to the five year old who started all this in the first place and I said Francis what do you what do you think free speeches and she thinks really hard and then she finally says free speech is that you can say anything you want as long as I like it and you know as a parent sometimes you look at your child and you have this revelation and that was the moment I looked at my kids and I said I get it like my oldest child is the conservative my middle child is a libertarian and my youngest child is a totalitarian socialist but this is a good introduction to tonight's speech because one of my big worries out there and I think a big dramatic shift that we have seen in politics is that we increasingly are living in a world in which people believe that the First Amendment is something akin to the five-year-old's description of it you can say what you want as long as I like it and if I don't it's your job to withdraw and we've seen this political shift I don't want to suggest for one minute that we haven't always had political intimidation and abuse of people in politics obviously it's a long-standing tradition not just in this country but in many countries around the world in fact the whole globe but we have seen a ramping up a bit in this country and what's interesting about this shift is it unlike most political shifts in Washington I've covered Washington for a long time it's usually hard to name a date when something began to change in Washington but in this case in terms of this turbocharging of an attempt to silence political opponents you can't actually trace it back to one day and that one day is January 21st 2010 and that's the day that the Supreme Court of the United States issued something called the Citizens United ruling now for those of you who are not as aware of that we have these things out there called campaign finance laws I myself I don't like to call them campaign finance laws I call them speech laws and here's why because you live in the United States and you are someone that would in fact like to censor other people especially if you're a government official for instance you have a real problem because America has got the best protection of free speech of any country in the world First Amendment which begins Congress shall make no law and it is pretty absolute that way Congress shall make no law so if you want to go out and tell someone they need to be quiet you're going to have a very hard time of it but about a hundred years ago politicians figured out a way that in fact they could nonetheless clamp down on free speech and that was to use a proxy for free speech money because money is in fact a proxy for free speech if you think about it a long long time ago if you wanted to give out your political message all you needed to do was go take your soapbox and stand on your village corner and pretty much anyone who was important or needed to know would hear what you have to say you can't do that anymore these days if you want people to hear your political message you do need money whether that's for airplane flights or train tickets around your state if you're a presidential candidate or a Senate or a congressional candidate even a local candidate for TV ads or radio ads in order to rent out a hall to have people come and see you speak you even need it if you want an internet site you want a cell phone so that you can text to your supporters all of those things are considered campaign finance expenditures and in general while campaign is not directly a finance money is not directly speech it is a proxy for speech and as such the more money you have in politics the more free speech you have the less money you have in politics the less free speech you have about a hundred years ago some very clever politicians figured this out and came up with the first campaign finance laws restricting money that could be used in politics and of course they presented this as a good thing stopping corruption and elections making sure that everybody knew what was going on limiting the amount of influence dollars could have on politicians but if you go and you look at the actual record of all of these different laws that were passed almost always it's one side trying to shut down the other we have examples all through history again starting about a hundred years ago of Republicans for instance putting in place campaign finance laws the only targeted unions and union supporters why because unions tended to support Democrats we have all kinds of laws that Democrats put in place that tended to only target corporations why because corporations support Republicans and this trend of campaign finance laws and putting more and more restrictions on people that you didn't want to see in politics continued on and on until we got to the mack daddy of all campaign finance laws something called mccain feingold and that was passed back in 2002 there were legal challenges to it it went all the way up to the Supreme Court and at that point a majority of the court looked at this and he said you know what we have gone beyond the pale you people have put too many restrictions on too many outfits out there you are in clear violation of the First Amendment and we are going to knock down a big portion of this law we are going to let unions and corporations and all kinds of different groups back into the political sphere and so that happened on January 21st 2010 now the reaction to that was very notable many on the conservative right had come to realize over the years that these campaign finance laws were in fact restrictions on First Amendment rights and they had backed away from them they had not been a big fan of the makai mccain-feingold law and they applauded the fact when it was knocked down many on the political left had a very different reaction they had come to rely more and more on these laws as a way of keeping their political opponents out of the debate and when this decision came down they were very unhappy about it and you have to put it to you in the political context of the time this is early 2010 okay the Democrats are in control of the Senate and the house they have the white house but they have passed a number of things that are proving very unpopular out in the country already political and commentators are noting that a tidal wave is growing out there a backlash against stimulus the president's affordable health care plan you have the Tea Party movement rising up all of these people threatening to pour into the political sphere and suddenly the Supreme Court says and by the way we're opening all of you to come back in and voice your discontent and the political left freaked out and you can actually witness this you watch the the television commentary at the time the political writing at the time they were petrified about what this month might mean in terms of their political opponents suddenly having vast new freedoms to spend money and engage in speech to potentially put them out of office and over the next week or two they have this public discussion and they settle on a strategy and again you can actually watch this in public view this was a public debate and suddenly they come out go okay well here's our plan B if the Supreme Court says that we cannot use the law to legally bar our opponents from taking part in elections we're going to do the next best thing we're gonna harass them intimidate them generally send them the message that if they continue to exercise these First Amendment rights which have just been guaranteed by the court that they will pay a personal and political price and we have seen that in many many different forms and manifestations over the last six or seven years in some ways one tactic for instance and we'll run through some of the tactics one of the big tactics which has grown was training federal bureaucrats on your opponent's okay and this the best example we have of that is the IRS targeting scandal that happened and came out in 2012 and 2013 you know to this day if you go and you talk to the former White House to current Senate Democrats they will claim oh that was just a couple of our s line agents out in Cincinnati who didn't understand the law an honest mistake that is not true there were various serious investigations that were done of this in the House and Senate emails and documents and here's what we know we know that you had Senate Democrats every day in the wake of the Citizens United decision sending letters to the IRS demanding that they go out and harass nonprofits exactly the ones who ended up getting harassed you had the President of the United States Barack Obama out on the stump every day through 2010 doing some speeches for different Democrats who are running for re-election giving the same speech in every place and that speech went something along like this Supreme Court has just issued this decision there's all kinds of shadowy and shady organizations that are flooding into our political sphere we don't know who funds them we don't know if they're being funded illegally by foreign entities everyone should be very scared that outside influences are taking over our elections and our democracy somebody ought to do something about this and he meant the IRS you had outside groups political activist groups on the Left who are also sending letters demanding that the IRS do something again about the very groups who ended up getting targeted in the end and you had an IRS bureaucracy that was well aware of this debate they had been under pressure for several years by these same people to take steps to do something in particular about conservative Tea Party groups and other nonprofits that were moving into the political spheres so they know exactly what was being asked to them and we know from the notes and the documents that Lois Lerner and other bureaucrats listened to those calls for help and they acted they ended up taking 400 different conservative organizations who represented tens of thousands of average citizens and putting them on ice not giving them their nonprofit status not allowing them to fundraise in in fact silencing them not just during the 2010 midterm elections but in the 2012 presidential elections and this is very feeling we now know from all of those investigations that in early 2012 the senior members of the Treasury Department which run the IRS senior members of the IRS were aware of what was happening and knew it was wrong in fact we're taking remedial steps to make sure that it tried to stop and yet they hid that from Congress for the whole rest of the year and the only I think conclusion you can draw from that is that they wanted this to continue they wanted those groups to continue to remain silenced through the 2012 presidential election we see other intimidation tactics by bureaucrats in other agencies of the federal government the Securities and Exchange Commission the Federal Election Commission the Federal Communications Commission many of them aimed at trying to force people to out the names of their donors to discourage them from taking part in political practices so that's one tactic another tactic which I find even more scary is the growing tendency of prosecutors to misuse their powers to go after people who they disagree with politically I think the best example we have of this is what happened up in Wisconsin and what was known as the John Doe escapade does anyone even heard of us raise your hand if you have this is really one of the scariest stories ever a couple of years ago many of you may remember the Republican governor in Wisconsin Scott Walker passed a big union reform a government reform up in a state it caused a massive amount of controversy the Democratic legislature actually fled the state so that they wouldn't have a quorum to pass it they ended up getting dragged back there were enormous sit-ins and demonstrations in Wisconsin against us but it passed and it also survived judicial scrutiny not long after that happened there was also an attempt to recall Governor Walker and members of the Republican Senate who had helped pass this bill not long after that several liberal prosecutors in the Milwaukee District Attorney's Office launched a secret investigation into some 30 different conservative groups that had supported those Walker reforms and had also supported them throughout the recall election this was done under a law in Wisconsin called the John Doe law it allowed you to conduct an investigation secretly and with a gag order so these prosecutors were able to requisition all of their targets emails their financial records their phone records they staged pre-dawn raids on some of their targets homes in one case and this is one of the most horrifying stories I came up with in the book one of the targets was off on a charitable fundraising trip with his wife and his teenage son was home alone the police broke into the house in the pre morning light no light in the dark came in sequestered the kid in the room told him he was not allowed to call his grandparents who lived down the road told him that he could not call an attorney ransack the house took away computers phones equipment and as they left they said if you tell anyone what happened to you this morning you will go to jail so those were some of the tactics that were used in this the only reason we even know that this investigation went on and by the way it was done under a kind of hokey bogus campaign finance supposedly the people involved in this had violated Wisconsin campaign finance law and just by the way to put this in perspective 97 percent of campaign finance investigations are civil they're not criminal investigations so the fact that the prosecutors there were secretly investing these groups for potentially criminal violations gives you a sense of what was actually going on the only reason we know about this is a very brave man came to The Wall Street Journal and told us that he was a target of this investigation and we ended up writing stories about it after it came out he filed a lawsuit that lawsuit went all the way up to the Wisconsin Supreme Court which shut the probe down and in its opinion the Wisconsin Supreme Court essentially said this and I'm slightly paraphrasing it said the prosecutors in this case have been invented theories of law in order to go after cities who were wholly innocent of wrongdoing so that was in essence the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirming that the people who had been targeted by this probe had been targeted precisely to be intimidated out of politics the prosecutors had taken their things forced them to hire lawyers force them to devote all of their time and their money to defending themselves against the SPRO brethren doing the political work that they normally do and this again was in order to divert them away from their political engagement and to send the message that if they continued with it they could well end up in jail we have a federal corollary of that at the moment where we have 17 state attorneys general at the moment who have sent out subpoenas and are conducting an investigation into Exxon and various other conservative groups that have worked with Exxon over the years threatening to potentially bring racketeering charges on the grounds that they don't think the right way on climate science I mean I want you to think about that for a minute the idea that you could be thrown in jail your corporation could be shut down or subject to millions of dollars in fines because your science doesn't match with the prevailing science of those on the left and we have other examples of prosecutors abusing their power in different states again against political opponents another tactics outside coordinated activist groups who go after businesses and corporations who dare to voice a political thought who dare to support things like lower taxes or fewer regulations again another story that was in the book this was a campaign that was waged against an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council it's a non-profit it works at the state level and what it does is it develops model free-market legislation that state legislators take back to their legislatures and try to pass it's a remarkably successful organization something like 20% of its model rules and ideas get passed back at the state legislature level every year it's funded in part by corporations who have an interest themselves in promoting free-market legislation at a state level it had long been a target of many on the political left because it is very successful but after some of these new tactics began you saw a whole new campaign emerge against Alec and here's how it went it turns out that Alec at one point well the majority of what it works on is free-market legislation at one point it had a civil justice task force and it got involved in some of the Stand Your Ground laws that passed around the country these are the laws that allow you to engage in self defense if you feel threatened some of you a remember there was a very tragic and unfortunate shooting down in Florida Trayvon Martin a young african-american man and it was happened under the Stand Your Ground laws and this caused a big national outrage well someone traced back the fact that Alec had been involved in some of these laws and by the way I should point out these laws were passed in about 30 different states they were signed by both Democratic and Republican governors at the time that they passed they were not a partisan issue they were quite popular out there but suddenly many who didn't like Alec decided that they were going to turn this into a racial question and that they were gonna peg Alec for being a racist organization for having supported laws like this across the country and what these activist groups did there was about 30 of them they engage in these campaigns a lot they went and found out every name that they could that had ever given money to Alec and corporations and they went board by board to these different groups to Visa tax on two different groups and said we know that you've given money to Alec and Alec we are now branding as a racist organization if you continue to give money to Alec we will run ads in your home cities against all of your board members we will run ads on national television exclaim explaining that you are supporting racists organizations across the United States in a period of a couple of months Alec had lost nearly half of its donors you see this as well happening on by the way there was a a joint effort even as this was happening out on the field with these different activist groups targeting them they were working at the same time with Senate Democrats Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois even as this campaign an attack was going on against Alex sent out a letter to a thousand different organizations across the country saying I need you to reply to my committee I need you to tell me if you give money to Alec if you do give money to Alec whether or not you support its racist policies and just by the way you should know that if the answer to either of those is yes you could well get pulled in front of my committee to answer for yourself so that was the message that was sent to corporations across the country and really all they had done is given money to an organization that supported political change in a way that they thought would benefit their shareholders and their workers and by the way it's also guaranteed to them by the First Amendment so those are some of the tactics you see out there and they're widespread and they've been growing and we also see it on campuses as was mentioned and in ways that I think that most people aren't even aware of we tend to have a discussion about campuses in terms of political correctness and the fact that people feel insecure about talking in classrooms or voicing their opinions but there is actually an organized effort out there to make sure that there is no intellectual diversity on campuses you know there's an organization right now and I talked about it in the book called uncock my campus and that is K Ock and it of course is a reference to Charles and David Koch who are libertarian billionaires and tend to support free-market causes those brothers often give money to different universities to try to start programs there that offer a little bit of intellectual diversity some free-market thought different things often these programs are incredibly inclusive they bring in amazing different scholars but nobody there's a there's a group of unions and environmentalists big outside organizations that have come together and funded this uncock my campus Drive so that they can actually go and they acts have a tool package that they distribute to campuses across the country in which their devotees and the students that take up their cause are given step-by-step instructions on how you can make sure that no such intellectual diversity ever comes to your campus so it's a step-by-step guide one two three make sure you ally with professors who agree with you make sure that you call the press make sure that you send endless FOIA requests to the administration to try to harass them and make sure that it's just too big of a headache for them to ever let something like this come ensure that you let them know that there's going to be all kinds of sit-ins and negative attention and media if they go down this road because there seems to be a terrible fear about having intellectual diversity on a campus and by the way you don't see any of these things happen out there Tom Styer he's a billionaire on the Left he's given money after money millions of dollars to college campuses across the country to develop centers that support climate change research and others sort of progressive environmental causes don't see anybody protesting those or sending out step-by-step instructions on how to stop things like that but there are organizations that are determined to make sure that free market and conservative ideas do not come into campuses in addition to these tactics you see certain tools that are used and in growing amounts to make all of this easier for those who want to silence their opponents and one of the scariest ones is the use of disclosure we are all used to in this country thinking of the words disclosure and transparency being very happy and good in positive words but increasingly they are not they are scary words disclosure was always meant to be a system whereby Americans were allowed to keep track of their politicians but increasingly disclosure has become a tool whereby government and other people who would like to silence speech or keeping track of average Americans you see people filing FOIA requests you see them demanding more disclosure of campaign finance because they use it to get ahold of the names that they're going to go and target and people they're going to harass and I'll give you an example of how this can happen a couple of years ago California had a very controversial initiative fight over something called prop 8 which was in support of traditional marriage okay and I don't really care what your views are on this if you are for or against but I think we can all agree that everyone ought to have the right to express their views on it one way or the other anyone who gave money in California to the prop 8 initiative in favor of traditional marriage had their name in their donation instantly put online on a campaign finance disclosure site people who opposed prop 8 went through that site and got the name and the address of every single person that had donated and then put it on a searchable and walkable map so that you could go home to home and harass those that had supported this ballot initiative the peoples whose names were on that list had their cars keyed their windows broken threatening messages left on their voicemails and on their emails some of them went to work in their small businesses to greet flash mob protesters who showed up who wouldn't let customers come in to their place of businesses some of them even lost their jobs most famously the CEO of Mozilla Brendan Eich but there were many others that did as well too so this is the sort of way that disclosure is being used these days and it is very scary because in theory we shouldn't have this happening we had a debate about this in this country all the way back in the 1960s during the civil rights era and we had a very important Supreme Court case that came out of it called n-double-a-cp versus Alabama and in that case which everyone should know you had an Alabama Attorney General who was not very happy with the n-double-a-cp he was in favor of Jim Crow laws and the n-double-a-cp had been causing a whole bunch of discomfort for him and other politicians with the Montgomery bus boycott and other things and he decided he wanted to run that organization out of a state well what was the best way to do it he looked up at the old laws suggesting that the n-double-a-cp has not incorporated correctly in the state of Alabama and rather than just ask the n-double-a-cp to remedy this he went to a judge a favorable judge and got that judge to agree that the only way the n-double-a-cp could get out from this litigation was to hand over a list of every single one of its members in the state now ask yourself why the Attorney General of Alabama wanted those names and it wasn't so he could send them thank-you notes you know these were people and this is at a time when blacks in Alabama were still being shot at fire bombed there was violence on the streets the n-double-a-cp understood that if it handed over that list that it was tantamount to at the very least every person whose name was on that potentially losing their job their livelihood being subject to all kinds of Finance for enumerations but potentially it amounted to a death list so the n-double-a-cp refused to hand it over it went all the way up to the Supreme Court and in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court 9 to 0 the Supreme Court ruled that not only do Americans have a right to free speech not only do they have a right to freedom of assembly but that sometimes in order to engage in free speech and to engage in freedom of assembly you also have to have a right to anonymity and for a long time the court supported that precedent there were other cases that came out all the way up until Richard Nixon and Watergate when we got our first giant disclosure laws as part of campaign finance and the court interestingly it never overruled n-double-a-cp versus Alabama it confronted it it said look we understand we're sending some mixed messages here on the one hand we said you can have a you're allowed to sort of have privacy and your political actions on the other hand we're now telling you that you have to disclose all the money you give in elections but don't worry we still recognize that there is a risk to people and bodily harm to loss of livelihood so if you get in a situation like that just come to the court and we'll give you relief which was a nice idea back in the 1970s when Ken in finance records were all kept in dusty old boxes at the bottom of the Federal Election Commission you had to make some effort to go and get them but these days the minute you send a contribution it goes online and there is no time for the court to step in and remedy any harm or abuse that may happen to you as a result of the disclosure of campaign finance rules your campaign finance donations so we've got to do a lot of things about rethinking some of these rules and what needs to be done in light of an era of political intimidation we need to think about for instance whether or not we need to to change rules and and Strip bureaucrats of the ability to make political decisions about people one of the reasons we have elected officials one of the reasons that we require members of an administration to be vetted and go through hearings and be nominated and then confirmed to their offices is so that there's political accountability we know someone to blame if something bad happens but those bureaucrats working in the IRS that targeted those tens of thousands Americans we didn't even know their names for years we still don't know their names and the ability for an administrative state to work in the background and to enforce its own political views on those who are subject to its rule and authority is very scary you know I have made the argument to members of Congress that the IRS should have no ability to make a judgment about whether or not a non-profit is exceeding its political authority or not we have an organization for that it's called the Federal Election Commission it's a bipartisan organization its members are nominated and confirmed by the Senate they have to vote you have to have there are six of them three Democrats three Republicans you have to vote and have four members to proceed with any complaint those are the people who ought to be making political judgments about organizations I think we need to rethink our disclosure laws you know right now for instance anyone who gives more than a hundred and ninety-nine dollars to a federal official has to disclose that donation and I don't mean to sound like a cynic but having worked in Washington for a long time I can tell you that there ain't no politician that's getting bought off for $199 so you know we need to three think whether or not the threshold needs to be higher you know what is the risk of a politician being bought off I mean maybe we don't calculate donations anything below $5,000 or $10,000 so that people do not have to worry that they're the next on these targeted lists that someone's going to come to your house and break your window and and break your you know front door because you thought politically the way you that they didn't like and by the way just another part of disclosure you don't even know the ways in which disclosure can hurt you any of you who have given money in this room if you go to get a job interview let's say you go in and you have your very personal discussion with your prospective employer and they seem to like you and you leave and suddenly you never get a call back how can you know that he didn't go and look up what your political affiliation was and who you gave money to last time you've got kids they didn't make the varsity sports team even though they're pretty good athletes maybe it's because those varsity coaches know what their parents do and don't like it don't like who they donate donate it to last time you don't even know the ways in which disclosure might affect your life one way or the other so we need to rethink thresholds of giving amounts we need to rethink the types of things in which we require disclosure take for instance I mean one of the reasons we have disclosure laws is in theory and I actually agree with this is that we want to make sure we can track donations to individual politicians make sure there isn't a quid pro quo anywhere that people aren't buying off politicians I understand that but make the argument if we can and I'm not sure that we can for why you should track the money that people give to ballot initiatives you're not buying off a ballot initiative you're expressing your interest in a particular law and getting passed in your state is there a threat of corruption there and so should we disclose the money that people give to that issue ads we have a difference things called Express ads in which organizations directly support a candidate for office or directly oppose a candidate for office we should probably disclose who's running those but issue ads are ones of which groups say this is why we think health this health care bill is bad this is why we think this tax reform is a good idea what's the sort of corruption and saying that you believe in ideas maybe we don't need that kind of disclosure for that as well but what we do need to recognize all in all is that we are living in a very different environment these days one in which there's kind of a null holds bar situation and and I don't want to suggest that this is widespread it tends to be something that happens in the very hardened political activism of certain quarters it's it's not the way that average Americans think and in fact often when people hear about some of these abuses there is bipartisan outrage because Americans by and large generally believe in and love the First Amendment but within those circles of political activism these are tactics that are growing it's often hard to see them as with bureaucrats behind doors it's often hard to stop them how do you make an attorney general stop doing something they have vast amounts of power and so we all need to be on guard against it and need to think about ways in which we can institute laws or new rules or restrictions to make sure that you out there have outer total freedom to engage in politics because it is one of the greatest rights that you hold and a special thing that is more preserved and more respected in America than any other country and we need to make sure that that never goes away so I want to thank you all so much for being so patient listening to that long thing and I'd be very happy at the moment to take any questions if anyone has them also about the election because unfortunately it's my job to cover politics so I think there's a microphone somewhere if there are any questions right oh there he is so if anyone has one raise your hand I mean there's gotta be something right I mean Trump just became president no questions anywhere oh hi yes but I mean I think it's sort of unfair to say it's like how do you feel about the massive project of voter suppression through felony voter disenfranchisement and the fact that our president is now silencing government organizations everything like that like how do you feel so by the way when I started this book and I and I want to be really clear I am a kind of First Amendment fanatic and an equal-opportunity fanatic on the First Amendment and I originally started this book proposal because I was going to assume that it was on both sides of the aisle and I did a whole bunch of research on this and of course there are examples of Republicans doing this from time to time one of the best examples that I found was back in 2004 as on the con eve of the election in which Bush was running against John Kerry there was a liberal pastor out in a kind of mega Church in California who gave a very fiery sermon in which he sort of seemed he didn't really but he in essence seemed to kind of endorse John Kerry and the bush IRS opened an investigation into this because in theory if you're a 501c3 you're not supposed to you know take political positions and he didn't it was outrageous and now interestingly by the way it was Republicans as well as Democrats who came down very hard on the bush and the IRS for doing that and said whoa dude stay out of this and you know this is an abuse of IRS power so there was another example I remember in the Bush years when I happen to know for a fact that the Republican commissioners on the Federal Election Commission came under enormous amount of pressure from very high places to crack down by using sort of rulings on these organizations called 527s which at the point at that time were almost entirely a vehicle of the political left and so you know that there was a demand that the FEC shut down all of these groups that their opponents were using and luckily those on the FEC did not heed that call moving onto Trump I my biggest concern about what Trump has done so far has been his comments to corporations the sort of carrot and stick approach which seems to be really heavy on the stick in that and what bothers me about it is it's one thing to say to corporations here's why you shouldn't leave the country I'm a Salesman for America you know we're gonna lower tax rates we're gonna get rid of regulations we're gonna make it a better business climate for you here and encourage them to stay the other way around suggesting that there will be terrible penalties and punishments on them if they take their workers somewhere else I mean this is a man that has a great deal of authority and power and you have to be very careful about who you threaten with it because there probably is more no more powerful person in the entire world and then Donald Trump at the moment which is really a thought if you think about that but I I'm not as convinced that you use a word voter suppression I'm not as convinced that there is some organized effort to keep anybody from the polls I know that some people call it voter suppression other people call it voter ID laws and a determination to try to make sure that you use an ID and show that you are who you are when you go to the polls most of the examples I used in this book were clear examples of people who had abused their official authority they were bureaucrats who you know went after and targeted average Americans they were prosecutors who actually brought actions against average Americans I have a much more open-minded view about the idea of different activist groups going out there and making it cause I think it's different when you're threatening saying you know we're gonna call you racists we're gonna call you whatever but everyone everyone in this country has a right to voice their opinion and even to say I'm not gonna buy things from your company or I'm not going to be involved with your company but it's different than threats so I really didn't find a lot of that the closest thing people have said was well what about the right and Planned Parenthood and the what they viewed as intimidation of Planned Parenthood I think the one distinction there as well as that this was oversight by Congress into an entity that takes a lot of tax dollars you can argue whether or not that oversight was correct or proper if it went overboard but they certainly had a right to look into it given what had come out and and again given that everyone in this room who pays taxes was involved in funding that organization yes sir thank you first of all thank you very much for this Beach you're welcome secondly yes as you mentioned Trump just became president so yeah how do you do you think what do you think about this and what can he do to actually take so I think look one thing we never heard a lot from Donald Trump while he was out on the campaign stump was some you know we had guys like Ted Cruz talking about how he was going to restore respect for the Constitution to the White House that was not like a big Donald Trump campaign promise and so you know I think there has been some worry given his statements and given that you know he doesn't really like people who defy him and everything that there is you know he might miss you some of his power and do the sort of same things that we saw happen in the Obama administration to people he doesn't like on the left I do think that is something we all have to be aware of and guard against the one thing that I think is a natural check on that though is that you know the realities and there's been surveys that show this most federal and public employees are Democrats registered Democrats and I think we're Donald Trump to demand anyone in the federal bureaucracy or their political masters at the heads of agencies demand that the federal bureaucracy misbehave they'd probably blow the whistle pretty quick a lot quicker than anyone would have done with the Obama administration doing what they did so will he do anything to fix this that I don't know yet because we're gonna have to wait and see one thing that I think is encouraging is that he because of Mike Pence his vice-presidential candidate in his long history in the house my reporting I mean they are really are working in tandem House and Senate Republicans and the White House there is a real sense of trying to get things done together and I know that this is a high priority for a lot members of the House in the Senate instituting reforms like this and a lot of different ways about the bureaucracy and their powers against potentially disclosure laws a lot of different areas like that and if Trump steps back and allows House and Senate Republicans to pursue that agenda I think we could get some bills and I think yes there may be I don't believe he's probably going to go down the path of going after Hillary Clinton and servers and everything but I do think that there probably will be a new investigation in the Department of Justice into what happened at the IRS because a lot of people out there feel that there never was one and that nobody was in fact ever held accountable yes yes yes well no I mean but for better or worse and I'm not going to defend any of this but better or worse the Constitution doesn't say that as part of your free speech you can't lie we expect our public officials to tell us the truth we get varying forms of that truth all the time the word they use for it in Washington is of course spin it's a time-honored tradition in that city it's interesting to now see people using the word lie which is a much more aggressive thing there is no question the president is prone to exaggeration but you know there's there's gonna be a job for the press to fact-check this stuff except for here's a problem and I think the press has got a problem of its own is that people have spent a lot of time in particularly the press over last couple of weeks talking about Donald Trump's lower approval ratings about the fact that he comes into office was lower approval ratings than Barack Obama did or George W Bush or Bill Clinton all of which is true you want to know the one institution in the country that has significantly lower approval ratings than Donald Trump the media people don't trust them and this is a problem that our media has got us into in this country when a reporter walks into the White House and the first thing he does is tweet out that the President of the United States removed the bust of Martin Luther King I mean think about how inflammatory that is you have a president that's been accused of all kinds of things and the first thing that as the press corps walks in the pool reporter and tweets out to millions of Americans that the president removed the bust of Martin Luther King jr. not true and I appreciate that the reporter apologized for that but it was the rush to judgment and the kind of leap there and the desire to sort of create an uproar that is why a lot of people don't trust the media and and so you have this interesting dynamic at the moment where the President of the United States and his press secretary are saying things that simply don't add up but when it's the press it's trying to fact-check them a lot of Americans don't trust them either they have not done a lot for their credibility in the way they covered them leading up to the election the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win the constant rooting for her in their newspaper pages and and on TV and so a lot of Americans when they hear the press outraged about what's coming out of trumps mouth they have an even bigger problem with it being the press that's the one that's outrageous so I think a lot of different elements of our public institutions need to think very hard and try to repair their reputation with the country if you could please give us some insight into how colleges are protected by free speech what we see at college is especially private colleges like Hamilton is that you're talking about campaign this finance disclosure as well the reality is that there is a lot of money coming from the Board of Trustees from alums and I dare say even parents who don't even know how the money is being used by the administration to steer let's say faculty hiring in a certain way that it's not simply a department that decides the profile of candidates in other words their qualifications but the administration has political concerns about what should be done I guess what I'm concerned about is that colleges especially private colleges don't seem to have obviously the openness the need for disclosure the checks and balances we don't have the institutional structures that the United States government at large has let alone the eyes of the public on individual issues I dare say as I said that we really are suffering from a very closed system and as I said where there is money at stake and it's being funneled definitely in a certain direction so what is what is the first amendment excuse me what is free speech at a college like this when we just heard before your introduction how students are openly intimidated let's say here at Hamilton for their political beliefs last year or year or two ago there was a student in sociology who wrote a paper who was and gave a public talk about being intimidated for her religious beliefs so are we out of the system are we somehow exempt from the First Amendment here thank you yeah I mean there's no question I've been giving talks to different college campuses and you know I mean it's interesting even to the degree that sometimes there has to be like extra security around so that you can have a conservative speaker come in and talk and and these are supposed to be places of intellectual diversity where I love to hear other people's thoughts I love to have debates this is why I do the job that I do I like to joke that my skin is so thick it starts here and ends at the back of my head you know if I can't have a debate then I I don't know I'm in the wrong job but we need to be training our kids to do that too I get asked this question a lot and it is true universities are by and large some of the least transparent organizations that are out there they might be open sometimes about their finances and stuff but in terms of how things actually operate on the campus and there are different rules and procedures and my answers I say this to parents all the time everyone always says well what do we do and I said you have to be involved and you actually have to demand accountability and you have to demand look would you go out and spend 40 thousand dollars on a car that you didn't research and then if it broke the next day would you just be like oh well ya know you know this is a serious investment people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars educating their children are giving their money to an institution and expecting a service in return and I would like to hope that one of those services would be civics lessons and sort of explanations about what the First Amendment is and what the purpose of a liberal you know public education private education is and I mean liberal in the old-fashioned sense of the term and that we want to expand people's thoughts not close people's minds and when you have safe zones and you know I want a safe zone for the First Amendment myself but but I think it's going to have to be about more accountability and asking people to pay more attention to where their kids are going off to for four years or five years and and demanding some changes if necessary thanks for an excellent talk to what extent is it your impression that targeted groups and individuals in the kind of situation to describe have successfully withstood this pressure publicized in or counteracted even if it was afterwards yes so this was the most uplifting part of doing this book you would think if you went out and you spent an entire year and I think I interviewed about 80 people for this book because a lot of its told in the first person stories of what happened to people do you would be a bit demoralized after you heard all this but in fact it was incredibly encouraging inspiring because the people who were in this book they by and large all of them had fought back they had spoken out about what had happened to them they had as a result you know encouraged a sort of groundswell of support because again that was something that was very encouraged to me you had asked about the the right you and the in the front but again it's the the sort of dedicated political factions that are engaged in this but average Americans right or left Democrat or Republican they have a wholesome belief in the Constitution and when these people came out and told their stories about what had happened to him there was a bipartisan outrage all around you know because Eric O'Keefe came and talked to us at The Wall Street Journal that probe in Wisconsin got shut down not only that but Wisconsin changed his John Doe law and got rid of the ability to do these sort of secret investigation it changes campaign finance laws and tightened it up so that prosecutors wouldn't have near the wiggle room to go out and conduct witch hunts under its auspices and they also changed it's it's sort of government ethics board which had helped in this investigation and done some very naughty things along the way so there was reform across the board in Wisconsin as a result of one guy coming out and being brave enough to talk about it and again by and large people have been brave in the face of this stuff but what worries me is that there are on the other hand a lot of the people who've been targets of this they've been out there in politics to kind of know that you need to speak up say something they were brave enough to go to one of these groups in the first place the more depressing thing to me was the stories for instance about what happened to people out in prop 8 and we know these stories because many of them gave depositions as part of a lawsuit afterward and nearly every one of them in the course of that deposition said based on what happened to me in this in this initiative in this backlash I would not give money again to an initiative and those are your average Americans who they want to live quiet lives they want to take part in their society they want to engage in civics they want to do their part but they don't want people breaking their windows and they don't necessarily they didn't get into it in order to have to stand up day by day and push back and those are the people that get pushed out of the system and that's the worry so anyway thank you all for your time I think we're about done and I appreciate you on a busy night coming out and a cold one too to listen thank you [Applause]

Channel: Alexander Hamilton Institue for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI)

Views: 17,380

Rating: 4.9006772 out of 5

Keywords: Strassel, Wall Street Journal, free speech, college campus, Alexander Hamilton Institute

Id: yEOioitM1PA

Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018