 Today, we're going to be hearing about when free speech is actually its opposite, so from Dr. Sean McFessel. He is a faculty member of the English department at Highland College. He received his PhD in Language and Rhetoric at the University of Washington in 2014 and masters in teaching in English to speakers of other languages in 2010. He has published two books, Non-Violence Ain't What It Used to Be, Unarmed Insurrection and the Rhetoric of Resistance and Suffold How It Gush and North American Anarchist in the Balkans. McFessel has authored a number of academic and popular articles and has appeared as a social movement scholar on radio and TV. He has been involved in social movements and approaches for the last 30 years in the US, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. So without further ado, Dr. Sean McFessel. Thank you so much, Lee. I want to begin by acknowledging that we are an occupied Jewish land and we were honored actually on Monday or Tuesday to hear from Cecile, who's the representative now for the Jewish, so it was an honor to have her here. I want to start by saying thank you infinitely much to the NLK Greek Planning Committee. It's a real honor to come here as a speaker and also to the Multicultural Affairs Office and the Minipultural Center and highlight. I really appreciate this opportunity. I also wanted another thing I want to say before we get started. This presentation, a lot of it is about this really ugly phenomenon and I'm a little worried it's sort of a downer presentation in some ways to just sort of be emotionally ready to hear some rough stuff. Some of the slides are actually referred pretty openly to racist and anti-career violence. I'm going to give you a warning when those come up, but just be aware that that's part of this presentation. And also just because we're focusing, I'm going to be focusing in this talk on kind of white nationalism and a lot of the really explicit, open displays of white supremacy and white nationalism that are happening in our country right now. That's not to say that probably the much more widespread, endemic, systemic white supremacy and racism in this country, you know, that's not to deny the importance and centrality of those. Luckily we've had a lot of really wonderful speakers already and we'll continue to and highlight and continues to be an amazing campus for talking about these issues. But I just want to acknowledge just because we're focusing on the really obvious, nasty, open, explicit kind of racism is not to deny the importance and the devastating effects of systemic more not always as open forms of racism. I also want to acknowledge my positionality as a white guy talking about this. It can be sort of paradoxical moments or whatever, but so I acknowledge that I'm talking about phenomenon. I'm not the primary target and sometimes I often don't have primary experience about it, but I do think that white people can, you know, play a part in fighting these systems and have to dislike everyone. And, yeah, with that, I think it started. So, what I'm going to talk about today is this weird phenomenon. There's been a lot of things that have happened to us in the last year as a country as a world. And of course, all of these things have roots, all of these things have been going on in some way for a long time, and we've really seen some abrupt changes in the way these things have happened. But I think it's caught a lot of us off guard. And I'm really, I'm only talking about one of those. There's many, many things. When we're talking about the legacy of MLK and his legacy of resistance and the history of inequality and racism that he stood up against, there's so many strains we can focus on. So, I'm just going to acknowledge I'm really focusing on one specific phenomenon that's happened over the last year. But maybe especially in the question-and-answer period, we can kind of work on applying this more widely and connect it to other things. But I think, particularly, it's something that's been happening on college campuses even locally and specifically across the country. So, I think all of us involved with this college should be concerned about this and shouldn't think about what it means for our positions. So, a lot of the disagreement and controversy has revolved around language in the First Amendment of the Constitution, the beginning of the Bill of Rights, the most basic important law of our government. And part of that says, Congress shall make no law of bridging the freedom of speech. This is kind of ambiguous. It's a nice idea, right? It's a lot better than having a king who can say you're allowed just to say things or a dictator. But there's some kind of ambiguity in the meaning of that. And what I'm going to talk about today is the way that some social forces are kind of playing with that ambiguity to put some things over on this and maybe how we don't have to take it. So, I don't know how many of you are just curious actually. Can you raise your hand if you've heard of this guy, Richard Spencer? He's up on the screen now. Okay, maybe about half a third of the room. So, Richard Spencer has come to notoriety especially in the last year, year and a half. He's an open white nationalist. He talks about wanting the United States to be a white ethno-state, meaning basically a place only for white people. And he talks about how he believes in peaceful ethnic cleansing. I have no idea what that could possibly mean. I don't think it's displacing tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people from their homes. It doesn't tend to be a peaceful process. So, I don't actually think he's lying. But he has this sort of polite demeanor. And he's been having a great deal of success going around and speaking at college campuses. We haven't seen him yet in Seattle, but I mean, he's in public. He's come here, but we might soon. We should be prepared. But I'm going to start with a story about him. I'm going to show you a few other stories to kind of show you this problem and then we're going to kind of break down the problem and how we can respond to it. So, currently right now, Richard Spencer has been invited to speak at the University of Michigan by, like, a conservative student group. And the administration says, well, you know, it's free speech. Well, let me just, I'm going to play the video. So, students have, he's been invited to become campus. And there's students who, you know, for very good reason are saying, let's not let this happen. This is ridiculous. So, they're protesting to try to stop it. What I want you to listen for, particularly, of course, what the students are saying, but the, one of the administrators of the college comes out to speak to them, the Chancellor, and says why he thinks they need to let Richard Spencer come. So, pay special attention to the ways that the Chancellor responds to the students' concerns in this video. Well, I think you go with the University's very considered, and I frankly think, quiet position. And that is that the University is committed to freedom of speech. And it is committed also to constitution and law. Constitution and law are unambiguous that when the, an external party requests access to the University's speech to rent space, we have to apply exactly the same standards, irregardless of content. And the University is vigilant about being both law governed and also respecting the values of the speech. I think, I hope it goes without saying that all of us, myself and the faculty and staff and students of this campus are opposed to hate. We are opposed to division. We are opposed to white supremacy. We are opposed to anti-gay bigotry. We are opposed to anti-muslim bigotry. We are opposed to anti-semitism. We are opposed to racism. In all of those ways, I think, I'm just kind of guessing, all of us stand together in the values that we have. And frankly, third party cannot disrupt those values. We understand that you say that you have this commitment, but there is a clear difference between saying it to 20 students outside of your office who you've only said it because you demand it and telling the almost 10,000 students that pay to go here directly that you believe that. So we're asking you to stand in your beliefs stronger than just this and to speak it to the entire university. If you really believe it, you should be brave enough to tell the entire university. I think there's one choice that will make a wise decision. The constitution of our country, the legal environment of our country and given the university's fundamental commitment to freedom of speech. It is our task, our task, to be a unified community that can communicate people who care about each other, who care about mutual respect, who paint paint. Okay, so you heard his response that he said because of the law, he said also because of the current legal environment in this country, which is an interesting phrase that we might come back to. And because of the constitution of the United States, they have to let Richard Spencer speak is what he said. They don't have a choice. And you know, he said even though it should go without saying that the university is opposed to things like what Richard Spencer is saying, that the University of Michigan has no choice but to let him speak. So we're going to get into that. That's what this presentation is about, is sort of how to answer that. One of the things that I just want to notice is there's, it's strange the way that this is applied because he says it goes without knowing and have no choice to use these very absolute phrases. Two years ago, the same university, University of Michigan, invited Alice Walker, I think a student group also, invited Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple, very famous, famous novel, famous film, to come and speak at the University of Michigan, at the same college. And the college disinvited her. They said that she could not speak because they actually sent a letter to her. They said some of the donors of the school did not like what she has said about the state of Israel. She made comments that said that she grew up in the Jim Crow South and when she visited Israel and Palestine, she said the system there reminded her of growing up in the Jim Crow South. So because she'd been talking about that, the same university with that same chancellor we just heard from said she was not allowed to talk and canceled her talk. So, and currently that same college, you can look at the headlines. I'm curious how it's going to turn out, but it sounds like they actually are going to allow Richard Spencer to speak. So there's something going on here. And I'm trying to figure out through this talk, you know, kind of what's this phenomenon and how do we respond? In burying this out, I want to tell you a couple more stories. Both of these are actually local and a bit closer to home. University of Washington in Seattle, I live, this is where I got my PhD and I live just up the street from this. So this hits me very close to home. They were having a performance. A student theater group was having a performance on the theater on UW campus of a Shakespeare play as you like it. And the majority, like all the leads of the cast, the majority of the actors are people of color and, you know, several, and they're portraying queer folks. There's several queer folks in it. And as they were in the performance with also a majority people of color audience, the, so by the way, this is the first of the flyers. There's a setting coming up, content warning. While they were performing this play with a full house, the theater was plastered with these posters from a group called Adam Waffen, which has, you can see swastikas on the flyers. And it says Seattle needs a good cleansing, drive out yellow, black and brown, the sodomites and degenerates. So we see explicitly extreme racist language and anti-gay lesbian queer language on these flyers. So, you know, and again, this went up while people were in the building, glued all over the outside of the building. So as you can imagine, this is a quote from one of the students. People are very upset. I mean, they felt directly attacked by this, right? And one of the actors in the play, she said, it was terrifying because all the leads were people of color as were a lot of our audience. We have people playing LGBTQ characters and that's a huge portion of our audience. It didn't seem arbitrary. It was like we were being targeted on purpose, right? The thing that upsets me so much is the blatant gaslighting that is happening across the nation. This can't be normalized, yet it is because we're seeing it so often. And she said out loud, addressing that same language we're hearing so much. This is not freedom of speech. This is harassment, Tamsin Glasser. So, you know, that's, I can very much understand how she would feel this way, right? That seems like a very reasonable response. One of the University of Washington police department was somewhat different. Rittenhauser, I think, was the chief of police and he came out in the same article and in regard to those flyers going up, he said this, putting up handbills is certainly legal. We want people to be able to promote freedom of expression and freedom of thought. For some people, those flyers are going to be clearly offensive for others. It's going to be seen as not offensive. We are an open campus that respects, here's the words, freedom of speech, freedom of expression. So, we will let people judge that in a way they want to and then this is the winning one. Obviously, if you find it offensive, you'll want to stay away from that, he said. So, the least we can say here is we're seeing fighting in frameworks with participants who said, well, there's freedom of expression, there's nothing we can do and people are like, this isn't freedom of expression, you're crazy. Another situation even closer to home, not physically, but in terms of the institution, shoreline, I have a lot of colleagues who teach at shoreline community college. There's a lot of great folks there, like it's a really good place, but there's one concerning phenomenon that my colleagues have drawn attention to, that there's been a crew of Nazi skinheads that have a long history of violence in the region called the Northwest Hammer Skins. They've been present on campus kind of hanging out that haven't made a big deal yet, but they're clearly sort of testing the waters to see how people react. When we're talking about how to respond, some of the teachers have sort of been saying, you know, I think they just feel like that because they feel like they're not heard, so maybe we should invite them into our classrooms and make sure they feel heard and then they won't feel so angry. So, to get us going on the topic, what I'd like to do now is turn to your neighbor, let's say in groups of maybe three, three or four, two if you're kind of in a smaller group, and introduce yourself, say hi. And I'm just kind of curious to hear a couple ideas. We're not going to have a lot of time, but just to kind of get us thinking about these things. In those three stories, Richard Spencer, you know, having to have his freedom of speech at the University of Michigan, the theater flyers being said, well, some people will like it, some people won't. Don't, if you don't like it, don't go near the buildings that Nazis are pasting. And then the talking about inviting the skinheads into the classroom. Do you think that that was the right, those are the right responses? And you know, why or why not? And do you have ideas of ways that that could have been done differently? So, go ahead, turn to your neighbors and talk about that just for a couple of minutes. We're going to have a half an hour after the lecture to have a discussion and a back and forth. Questions and answers, open discussion. So, make sure to hold on to some of the thoughts that you just had. And if they're not kind of addressed in this talk, I don't want to get into those, but I just, maybe just to kind of get us going, anybody, what was the response? Maybe if somebody could tell me something that their partner said that they hadn't thought of before. Anybody have something to offer that they hadn't thought of, the person they were in a group with? Okay, I lost them. We're good. Okay. I think one of my colleagues or faculty members said about, you know, they could use a language to express their opinion towards the matter, instead of using vulgar language than being able to pressure hatred of doctrines. You know, they could use a different type of language to push their doctrine, but instead of, they use something that was to offend each and every single one of individual people. So, it's all about how do I use it? Yeah, that's really, really well put and that's going to be one of the things we talk about later on is that there's content and there's also language, right? There's ideas and there's free exchange of ideas and then there's the way that we choose to put those in words and those can be kind of different things that might really matter when we're talking about freedom of speech. Okay, there's so much to say. I think what I'm going to ask you is hold on to the thoughts that you had and the thoughts that you heard in the conversation and if we touch on those great, if there are things that come up that we haven't heard, please bring those up in the question and answer period, but I'm really glad I heard some wonderful conversation on the topic. So, I'm going to kind of present my case for why we might want to oppose things that call themselves freedom of speech. People probably, some of you are familiar with the idea of scare quotes. So, this means just because somebody calls something freedom of speech doesn't mean it is, right? That's why I have their quotations instead of me saying it's something I think is free speech. Free speech is one of these things. It's so foundational. I was just hearing from somebody from Ethiopia who was saying, you know, it's something that really treasured about the United States because if you speak out against power and the authorities, the president in Ethiopia in a lot of places, you can really get in trouble. You could be killed. You could be imprisoned, right? So, it's really important that we have this law in the country to say you can't do that, right? But what is that, what are the limits of that law? Are there other times that you would want to oppose it even if people were claiming to be using that? So, I'm going to list off a series of kind of five problems, five things we might want to think about, and five reasons we might want to object even if somebody is saying, don't you like freedom of speech? Are you against freedom of speech? Then you have to let me talk. Not necessarily. The first one is inconsistency. We just heard about the Alice Walker Richard Spencer example. We can watch the news this month, because I think they're going to decide this month if you can speak or not. But already the fact that they're saying we have to, we heard from the chancellor that they have to, when they didn't have a problem cancelling on one of the greatest living novelists, says to me something's going on in the way that these terms are applied. Another story that happened recently that's kind of got some connections to other stories, there was a situation called Gamergate that somebody, if you're writing papers, you might want to write a paper on this. It was a really important situation that introduced some of these changes. In Gamergate basically happened, there was a several women, most notably Anita Sarkeesian here who were scholars, they do cultural studies work, they do stuff sort of like what we talk about in some of our classes here. And they're particularly talking about gender in video games. And Anita Sarkeesian does this really cool work. You can watch some of her videos where she's just breaking it down. If you look at video games, what kind of ideas do you get about what women are like and what men are like? What kind of ideas do you get about masculinity, femininity, if you spend a lot of time playing video games? She likes video games, she plays different ones, some games are better than others, but she kind of just looks at that. And what happened was there was this uproar from a lot of kind of sexist dudes who take video games really personally, who were like, who's she to say that? Like, I don't want to hear her talk, whatever. And they got organized and they started making death threats to her to the extent that she was supposed to do a cross-country tour of college campuses talking about her research. And all these different places, the college was like, yeah, I guess you have all these bomb threats. Good luck, there's not really anything we can do to protect you. And she had to cancel her whole tour. So where was her freedom of speech in this situation? Now, this gets crazy, stay with me here. The person most responsible for organizing those death threats and bomb threats and attacks on her was this person, Milo Yiannopoulos. By the way, if you see this with the sort of pinched fingers, this is a current sign meaning white power, this is not just A-OK. So Milo Yiannopoulos is a complex character, we could talk about him for an hour. But he was a person who really organized these attacks on her. Milo then went on a national tour of college campuses and in his talks, he said things again, prepare for upsetting material. He said things like Islam is cancer. He said feminism is cancer. He said, you know, slavery was a good idea. He said that trans people are mentally ill and should have like lobotomies. Really, really violent, really threatening language, right? And yet, at all these different campuses the colleges were saying, well, we have to let them talk. He's got freedom of speech, we can't tell them no. He came to the University of Washington and some of us were there. And a lot of the colleges where he went, there were big protests to shut him down and some succeeded, like Berkeley succeeded in stopping him from speaking. And that was a big national turmoil, right? University of Washington did not stop him from speaking. There were a bunch of skirmishes there were fights and somebody even got shot. One of the protesters trying to stop him from speaking or at least calm people down was shot by one of Milo's supporters. And yet, still, we hear him talked about oh, you know, it's important to give him his freedom of speech even if he doesn't. We don't like what he has to say. Part of the backstory here you might have noticed the, I've referred to it, the Chancellor of University of Michigan said you know, it's not a good idea in our current legal environment in this country as well as the Constitution, etc. I think what he might be referring to is there's a billionaire guy, Robert Mercer, he's a good name to look up. He was one of the main people who sort of was funding the Donald Trump campaign. He's a big, he's a really big funder of kind of far right clauses and he admits that he was basically funding the Milo-Unopolis tour and several of these other ones and then suing schools that said no. So I think when the Chancellor's like it's not a good idea in this current legal environment, they might be talking about this fear of right-wing losses which is scary but I don't think it's something that we should just give into. Another situation about the sort of inconsistency here's another sort of friend of mine he's in Philadelphia at Drexel University George Securilo Mayor and he he's got a fierce wit and he started writing a lot, he writes a lot and he started writing a lot about how messed up some of these people like Richard Spencer some of these right-wing people were and he sort of was putting out some tweets that made fun of them and they got really angry and they started making death threats and bomb threats at him until he couldn't actually teach his classes anymore. He had to start teaching by Skype and again the University they had, you know, they like had some Barley guards walk into class a couple of times and they said you know I'm sorry there's nothing we can do so he had to teach from home for about a year and then just last month he just retired he just quit. He had a protected job but because the University said I'm sorry we can't let some you teach your classes because the students could get shot or you can get shot we don't want to be responsible. He basically was pressured into quitting. Where was his freedom of speech? This remarkable author, Kyonga Yamata Taylor she wrote this book called From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. She's probably the best writer about, together with Tom and Hissy Coates about Black Lives Matter and the current moment. She's at Princeton University one of the most prestigious in the country in the African-American studies department and just as a phenomenal speaker I've seen her speak a couple of times she tried to come to Town Hall in Seattle. I don't know how many have gone to Town Hall. It's a really great place to see public events. She tried to do an event at Town Hall earlier this year and had all these death threats and bomb threats in the city the same city the city provided all that had all these police to protect Milo Yiannopoulos and his crooked University of Washington the same city said, you know what, I'm sorry we can't really protect you if you do this it's at your own risk and so she canceled her event in Seattle because she said she feared for her life. She has a really powerful statement you might want to look at again I'll say it where was her freedom of speech so there's just a stark inconsistency in the way these things are applied I'm going to bring up one more story. We're going to come back to this one later because it's kind of an interesting story for several reasons but this Palestinian professor Steven Saleda, he's actually an expert about Native American studies. His scholarship and most of his books are about Native American history and settler colonialism in the United States, but he's also Palestinian himself and last time that Israel started bombing, saturation bombing Gaza in 2014 he was angry and wrote some angry tweets all of his tweets were only criticizing state policy he wasn't saying anything about any people and individuals, he was saying the things that the state is doing are unforgivable and for that he was about to get a he just landed a job at University of Illinois he quit his previous job, he was moving to Illinois he'd already signed the contract and he was notified that he was like unhired there were protests especially at that college around the country, people said this is outrageous they didn't even give him a reason although finally they came out and they said it was because of these tweets and despite all of these protests, even a lot of this was actually kind of my profile a lot of people wrote letters and everything but he did not get his job back where was his frequent speech so the inconsistency is a really serious thing I think we can all see something's going on some people get to claim freedom of speech and some people don't and we can notice that all the examples that we heard of were these sort of white wing white guys and the people who were most hit by this that were seeing the examples often were people of color, women of color, queer folks another aspect of this it's connected but it's a different focus is that a lot of the time when people are talking about freedom of speech they're confusing it with something so for example it's an honor for me to be invited to speak to you today and it's not just I have something important to say give me a room with 300 people on the microphone and call everybody to see it that takes a lot of work and you only do that if somebody is sort of I don't want to say this by myself but if somebody is sort of earned being listened to that's when they get invited and it's if they reflect the values of the institution so for example here I have Seattle Town Hall and this is Angela Davis speaking Angela Davis is speaking there because she's had a lifetime of work she has a lot of stuff to say and these people want to hear it but there's nothing in the First Amendment that says if somebody wants to talk to a big room full of people that you have to listen to them that's ridiculous it doesn't make any sense there's limited resources whether it's a college campus in a public event or radio station or a published book or whatever saying you don't want to bother letting somebody say something that is not worth saying that's not censorship you're just not doing work to give them a platform so I find this a very helpful term when you're hearing these people say but free speech though don't confuse free speech with platforms because platforms are not a right another example of this happening I'm using the technical term somebody's offended recently at the university of Vermont I think it was a professor actually invited this guy Charles Murray to come give a talk and Charles Murray is most famous for this book he wrote I think in the 80s maybe the 90s called the bell curve that claims that white people are biologically more intelligent than people of color and immediately after this the book came out within weeks after this book came out all these things were coming out saying this is totally fake he has absolutely horrible science he has no evidence at all it's just pure racism and scientifically it's absolutely debunked and that was like 20, 30 years ago that this was shown to be totally bunk but for some reason the University of Vermont felt like they had to accept him as speaker on themselves and I think that is a really admirable decision to not give him a platform he's totally discredited like his the things that he's talking about have been shown time and again to have no value scientifically, socially, anything so why let him speak so these students interfered with the event and they made noise to disrupt his event now do you think they got thanked like the US public was like thank you for saving our ears from stuff that we know is damaging and actually not true at all no, the Washington Post supposedly one of the most liberal papers in the country newspaper of record within that week had two articles about it one said that Middlebury's violent response to having him speak reminded somebody of the Little Rock Nine and I gotta unpack that exactly, I gotta unpack that a bit the first black students to go to a previously segregated high school were like the professor and the students who were trying to stop him from speaking were like the white supremacists who were trying to keep out the black students what? and the same week we hear another opinion piece in the Washington Post that said protesters at the Middlebury College demonstrate cultural appropriation of fascism I'm not sure what that means but it's basically saying that they're fascists for not giving this guy a platform I hate to say it, I didn't put it in the slideshow cause it's too sad but Cornell West came out and he agreed with that he was like yeah these protesters we have to value free speech Cornell West yeah, that's how I feel, what? so my response to this my response to this is that basically I'm gonna come back to this in a minute some ideas aren't worth some things aren't worth talking about anymore some ideas are you can say oh yeah this isn't worth talking about anymore how white people are biologically more intelligent because a hundred odd years ago like thoroughly over and over that was like disproven as a thin excuse for robbing people of their lives that's not science that's not a good idea that maybe we should discuss so on one hand we hear a lot of people questioning the so called experts or whatever it's good to like question authority it's good to ask questions but at a certain point you're like wait I'm pretty sure that actually that's not true and it's sketchy to try to talk about that to raise these as if it's not settled for example holocaust denialism for example the idea that maybe World War II did not involve Nazi Germany putting 6 million Jews plus to their death in a variety of horrifying matters this is a picture of Auschwitz we now generally recognize that it's absolutely proven that this happened right and to question this to say well but really though is questioning this massive suffering there's every scientific reason to know that this happened and to question if it happened and maybe distrust the science it's also to question that's suffering we think we know as we should know that it's a closed question and it's sketchy it's wrong to bring it up like it might not be right so I think what people like Murray are doing and Richard Spencer and all these people is they're trying to do the same thing with 19th century like racial science back in the day when you know people would say well if you measure somebody's head you can find out their natural race and their ability well we know race exists in a very real way as a social phenomenon we get treated very differently depending on what race we're red on that's very real race does not exist biologically in any way skin tone, care texture these like eye shape mouth shape these things that don't have anything to do with each other and certainly don't have anything to do with ability or intelligence we have a history of those being used as excuses to rob people of their lives but we know that those excuses aren't true that's not like an interesting question to ask so this is to me it's like the holocaust to act like maybe these are questions worth asking is like asking if maybe the holocaust is not all we thought it was or something this is more of the images from back when it seemed like people had these interesting scientific questions about race which were really just an excuse for the inequality that had produced that the society had with no scientific basis so when these people are talking about these supposed interesting ideas of inquiry and Richard Spencer is using his polite language we should hear it for what it is which is basically saying we should go back to a time when our institutions were not diverse when we didn't even pretend to have legal equality for people and when we had basically institutionalized apartheid in this country that's what they're saying is to go back to that with these excuses of things I don't know why we would make space for that a couple other related points I wrote this piece recently for the Federal Way Mirror and I made the point in this that the only content in what they're saying if you look at it is that other people shouldn't be allowed to speak right? so if the only content in the interesting ideas of Richard Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos is because of somebody's sexuality or because somebody's race that maybe they're not full human beings maybe they shouldn't have a spot in the public what that's actually doing is taking away speech from a huge number of people and so that's why I'm saying it's actually the opposite of free speech no matter how much they like to tell us that they're practicing free speech right? and that's how you should treat it, it's the opposite of free speech philosopher Carl Popper talked about the paradox of tolerance and he said it's kind of a contradiction because you want to have a society that's tolerant and allows all sorts of people but if there's people who come up in that that don't believe in allowing all sorts of people if you have intolerant people in that society what do you do with them? it's a problem right? and you can basically if you tolerate intolerance then as we saw in Nazi Germany Carl Popper said it'll put an end to your tolerance society those people found a loophole and they can make it an intolerant society so the solution to it is you actually have to be intolerant to intolerance if you're going to stay tolerant okay that's a lot of words I'm going to show a video that just came out yesterday by this woman Molly Stewart that basically says maybe everything I just said in a lot cuter images so I'm just going to play this so my baby brother is convinced that he has the right to free speech and I'm like sure you can cry all you want but I shouldn't have to listen to it hey you know what that's just like what's going on with the fall right if region suspenders is at a dinner party with a bunch of dinosaurs crying about how white power isn't the same as it was in the olden days I'm like la di da I'm making pancakes don't care but if he's on TV with a bunch of people cheering and doing weird Nazi gestures then I'm like what is this scary man can tell people they aren't human and no one listens to me even when I have super genius ideas she says it's because I'm not a white man funded by right wing billionaires so I guess like even though everyone has the right to speak money makes some people way louder but what I don't get is that my baby brother isn't being paid by billionaires and he's so loud I'm gonna march around the house with my accordion on the mount so we don't all go crazy this university that bring in the police to keep the protesters away this is so unfair now I feel like crying so I close my eyes and try to remember what the police taught me about the first amendment a long time ago there was a group called the Wobblies who wobbled around for many years protesting places that didn't let people sit freely when police came to take them away there were two of them wobbly to be arrested they were sprayed with fire clothes instead but they kept right on saying that workers shouldn't be starving and stuff like that and then later I can't remember when I knew B. Berkeley who was handing out papers and got arrested for it but his friends saw them put him in the car and said oh no you don't and climbed on top like it was a jungle gym they stayed there for 30 hours now students can't give out papers without getting into big trouble oh and then there's one of my most favorite phrase speecher ever, Colin Mr. Kaepernick meals on the football field because the national anthem has a white people rhythm could we get a little jazz in here and like the brother or the crazy rich white guys Mr. Kaepernick doesn't have his free speech protected and now I don't get to see him on television anymore all I see on television are the really terrible things that people do after they listen to the fault right guys no idea about what to do about my baby brother I found out about something called the marketplace of ideas it's like the flea market except whichever idea is sold the most becomes the truth and all the junk ideas disappear so I'm selling my brother's cries in the marketplace of ideas and hoping that no one buys them I hope Richard suspenders store goes out of business just like mine will so his ideas will disappear with my brother's cries it turns out he and his dinosaur friends are much more dangerous than my baby brother for now I think they need to be drowned out so we're going to need a lot more accordions when I saw that I was like I might even give you a talk I should just play the video over and over so um so I'm going to end kind of quickly with an overview of some of the way some of our accordions some of the tools that we have in a few different ways to oppose these kind of this kind of language these kind of speakers you know these kind of events in our community I'm going to race through them because I underestimated my time as always overestimated so first of all there's a list of legal responses also we have half an hour for Q&A after this so any of these that you want to find out more about we can go more in depth then so for example I wanted to say you know Highline is really in a particular position with this stuff we haven't really had any of these problems yet and hopefully we won't be faced with them but because we're the most diverse college in the state you know if this stuff kind of comes near our campus it might be particularly difficult I'm so happy about our cultural diversity cultural diversity policy we say Highline College actively promotes and supports learning and work environment which ensures social justice mutual respect understanding civility and non-violence and as opposed to discrimination so just for all of us in our different positions to think about what it means to actively promote and support that kind of environment if we're faced with this kind of challenge it might be complicated and so far the Attorney General of Washington has taken a very passive role and sort of gone together with this well whatever you know these people say is probably freedom of speech and I mean we might need to kind of be prepared for situations and deal with those contradictions ahead of time I think Highline has been really a leader in this already and is really ahead of the curve but it's a problem that I don't think anybody has the answer to yet so we need to be preemptive and really think about those solutions I think in some ways we are and it's something also that we should all be working on I wanted to say it's in the title of this talk but actually I don't find it the most useful term because it's legally really ambiguous it doesn't necessarily it can be really hard to apply because you have to show somebody's motives and also a lot of the time hate speech or hate crime modifications are actually applied against sort of the wrong people a lot of the time applied against people protesting racism or against these things are kind of ambiguous and part of that is because I'm not sure hate is actually the issue right so for example here's another content warning I'm going to show a couple nasty flyers in just a second here's a couple here's a flyer from one of these sort of neo-nazi groups and here's the 14 words this is sort of the white nationalist motto right now and notice the 14 words they say we have to secure the existence of our people and a future for white children whereas the hate they're just it's all about the children right I don't think we should fall for that but notice they're being really careful to not sound like they hate anybody they're just we just care about our children right and here this flyer from this nasty traditional worker party love your people and so we know this is coded as racism this is coded I mean sure it's hateful but it's kind of hates the thing that's hard to point out however racism is pretty clear right so if we acknowledge that racism is the problem you know homophobia bigotry then we can have a critique towards it if we're looking for the hate you know they might say oh no it's just about love it's a little it's not the clearest standard so I'm going to blow through these and if you want to hear about any particular one of these I'm happy to revisit it in the Q&A there's a thing that is effective called real threat where if there's a situation given the context if a reasonable person feels like knows that they're being threatened then that's not protected speech so I think for example the college republicans the group that brought Milo to the UW campus the day after there was that shooting they released a statement and they're like activists labor people leftists gay people whatever there's like this list they're like we are coming after you we will put out your flame after like a day after a shooting that by somebody associated with the group that's a context that makes that a real threat so that's not protected speech Milo targeted a trans student at a previous event and the student had to drop out of college because so many people were threatening that person that was a real threat that's not protected speech if somebody's getting rid getting in the way of what a college is there for the material disrupting the purpose of a college that's not protected and that can be something that's limited harassment even if somebody's talking when they harass somebody it's not freedom of speech it's harassment it's not protected speech this pops up on campuses all the time I would claim that that UW theater thing where people were inside and these threatening like death threats were pasted on it was not freedom of speech as the UW has written House I think is the guy's name said there was definitely not protected speech it was actually prosecutable another terrible example I want to throw at you so again this is maybe the worst yet this is a very transphobic and homophobic flyer we're about to see this happened two months ago that's so awful I'm sorry to show you this but it's a really clear example of this what we're talking about this group at the Cleveland State University posted this flyer encouraging queer students to kill themselves because a very large number of youth suicides so ugly a very large number of youth suicides are queer folks so this flyer is saying do it join your fellow F word and it's signed fascist solutions that's the group that put it up and what's the response from the administration of Cleveland State University they said you know of course just like the other guy of course we believe in diversity we're proud of our diversity and then in their official letter they said CSU is also committed to uphold the First Amendment even with regard to controversial issues where opinion is divided that was their response to this flyer so I would argue rather aggressively that that is not indeed First Amendment and it's not a divided issue right it's extreme harassment it's a you know I can't believe that it's not and then finally incitement of violence is another thing legally it's not protected speech activists like on the left get go to jail for the stuff all the time I know environmental activists who because they talked about planning or you know they talked about how companies should pay the cost if they're doing environmental damage or hurting animals some people I know with animal rights just for saying that on tape they got years in prison they weren't threatening any people at all they were they were from guilty conspiracy and all these things and put away and then we have people advocating genocide and they get to claim free speech I don't think so so we're out of time I do feel like it depends a lot responses to these kind of things depends a lot on the context it's different if you see it in a classroom I think sometimes classrooms if you've built if you have a supportive environment where people have some relationships with each other it can sustain people kind of trying to figure these things out a bit more I had a class recently where an international student had sort of caught a hold of the of the build a wall rhetoric and they kind of were presenting this thing about how we should build a wall because all these illegal immigrants are making problems and I know that there were undocumented students in that class but because we had a relationship built up in the context of a classroom those students were like are you sure about that one part where you said that that's because of you know undocumented immigrants what was your source for that and they were able to get the student to reconsider the way they thought about stuff in a conversation a classroom is different than a public space and I think you wouldn't want that conversation if it was going to really upset or shut down conversation with other students but like that classroom people knew each other enough had enough trust that they could have that conversation and show that person maybe what they were missing so classroom it just depends building a classroom where you can support everybody and if it's strong enough maybe you can actually kind of work through that and show people ways of thinking that can work it depends and then finally campus response I feel strongly that this stuff is not going away we're going to have to deal with it in some form and the best way to deal with it is for everybody we should all be thinking you know as students as faculty as administrators as staff what are our accordions and also outside of campus right like as citizens as people who live in a certain area as parts of communities what are our accordions what's going on around us and what kind of ways can we stop them if I back thank you so at this point if you have any questions go ahead and raise your hand and I'll walk around with the mic and we'll go ahead and provide a brief Hello Dr. Shon, thank you for your presentation I have a question like we know we came from our ancestors who were fighting against each other like on a race on everything like black or white or brown in the past we have a very darkness right now we are a little bit good so instead we have some issues how long do you think it will take us how many generations it will take to this issue like a racism like a freedom of speech will go away I don't know but that's a great question I think this is actually a little bit I haven't answered this a little bit distant from this but I wrote two books I wrote my first book about former Yugoslavia and the war that happened there and what I was struck by and that and kind of why I decided to write a book about it was so people outside that situation people in the US were saying they've been killing each other forever because like religion and stuff that's actually not true at all before the 20th century people the people in that area weren't the people in that area weren't killing each other on any kind of big scale or whatever it was more like outside it was versus global and World War I, World War II hit there very hard and in the 90s had terrible civil wars there but when I talked to people and researched it what was actually clear was when people were in a really bad situation and they were competing for just like safety and they were convinced it's your family now that's your choice then people understandably people chose to protect themselves some people did a lot of people chose to do violence against others would not seem like the situation and then for example when World War II ended after massive violence massive World War II hit that area the hardest in all of Europe within a generation one out of three marriages was across ethnic lines so given a chance to like get past it to actually live like a decent life and not have to take stuff out of each other people generally are pretty anxious to get that chance so I have this weird idea that there's different from how we think about this a lot of times actually people can change really fast if the situation changes really fast right what I'm seeing in this country right now is that a lot of the people who were doing these kind of policies and feeling this kind of way they think they're in a corner maybe in a way that they're not and I think as soon as people get that their interests aren't opposed I mean a lot as soon as people don't see their interests as opposed but they see like that there's a system kind of if they see this setup and they see that they have a reason to get along the problem that situation can change really fast or in partite South Africa it seems it would never end it would never end and then there was this really amazing movement people rose up and I mean it took some decades but really you saw it happen on the surface really quickly and suddenly you have what I don't know a century of like apartheid overturned and a totally different system of problems too but this thing that seems timeless seemed like it was just how people were like one way like that so I think it could change the good news is I think it could change for the better really fast the bad news is I think it can change for the worse really fast also and I think this last year a lot of us have been a little bit winded by how fast a lot of things changed for the worse we didn't see coming I think people are the reason we've survived and adapted and evolved for as long as we have is because we can change we're really good at doing stuff in a new way that can be used for better or for worse I had a question about freedom of speech you've talked a lot about what isn't freedom of speech but what do you think really constitute freedom of speech and and like why they wrote it into the constitution what do you think their intentions were what they were writing the constitution about so one thing is I don't think this has never actually happened in my life but I imagine if I'm having a fight with somebody and they're like well you have to be freedom of speech I'd be like I'm not Congress right because freedom of speech says Congress will not pass a law that abridges and if I'm telling somebody shut up we don't want to hear that here that's not my Congress I can say that it's fine arguably if I'm a teacher at the moment I would never but anyway so I think what I'm saying here is clearly when they made that law they were talking about the whole Bill of Rights and the whole idea was sort of liberal 18th century bourgeois system and government was coming out of monarchy they were like we don't want a system where you can have some dude that just says what happens we want something where you know that respects individual rights you have legal recourse you have a system set up to make sure that that happens right the world was a really different place back then and we found that a lot of those limitations weren't adequate but it's a nice you know it's a nice idea and I think the reason I posted this is I think clearly the point of the Bill of Rights and the point of the constitutional rights that we do have that I think we should fight for and hold on to is you know does anybody know the difference between has anybody heard the terms punching down and punching up I love these they're again when I hear a lot of this conversation I come back and I think who's punching up or down punching down is when there's somebody who's weaker than you who has less power it's like being a bully somebody that can get away with picking on it's like making fun of somebody who has less power than you you know so I think basically given the centuries of inequality in this country all the people that we're talking about here they're all punching down their bullies is basically what they are and they're supporting a systemic bullying system called racism that's dispossessed people of their lives and their wealth the difference between that and this which is a famous image from Black Lives Matter is clearly this woman she's very powerful in a sense but in another sense she's punching up she's not bullying these police that doesn't make sense because they have they're like stormtroopers in Star Wars they have all this special gear and everything and they have a law behind them they have a lot of history they have all sorts of power and she's not having it she's like nope I'm not staying in the street I don't even care what you think about the issue I'm gonna stare right here so that's punching up because at least structurally they have so much more power than she does and so she's fighting against where the power is and I think that's what the Bill of Rights was meant for it was past they're thinking about kings they're not thinking about you know small time bullies on each other whatever they're thinking about limitation on the powers of the government so do I think that I'm obviously critical of how freedom of speech is being used in this do I think that like people who have terrible racist things to say should be shut down by police I mean I don't know I guess not I wish police would stop shutting people down who had good stuff to say like this right so I think the thing is like essentially it's meant to protect people from punching up essentially the Bill of Rights including the first amendment is meant to put the check on the government but we're seeing those things twisted to a very very different meaning we're seeing them sort of punching down so how should we use the term freedom of speech is not being used that's a great question I don't know if I have an answer I think I just point out that it's not being used equally so somebody's like well why don't I have a freedom of I'm like well because a lot of other people don't so if you're serious about it why don't you let those people talk you know they think it's just pointing out that it doesn't mean what people pretend it does sometimes I think so I teach rhetoric classes here and I wrote my last book about non-violence and I didn't even say anything about what I think of like non-violence as an idea I just point out how people use the word so I think maybe it's similar here I think it's good for us to point out how people are using the word freedom of speech and then if you get them to acknowledge that you know there's problems then maybe you could start a conversation what should it mean but if these people no I don't think it makes sense as a reason to not what I'm saying is these people are like you can't shut me down you have to let me talk to us freedom of speech I'm like no I don't because that's not the standard that's being applied to other people who deserve it way more Questions earlier you were talking about the University of Washington on that one I believe it was Milo these responses with resources is there an insinuation that they're allowing more right behavior than left? Absolutely I think the evidence is on the table why wasn't that if they're going to have a police force from Milo why would they have it for the amount of candy tailored and also why would they have one from Milo so yeah absolutely and I think there's different ways to talk about this stuff if you want really like my take why that's happening I think it's not about what Mercer lawsuit and I think that the Chancellor early on who's like given the legal environment in this country right now we have to respect Richard Spencer's freedom of speech I think what he's saying is given that we're terrified of a lawsuit by this billionaire who's looking to sue us for this and for better or worse I don't think that there's any billionaire like people who are going to sue on behalf of George Sifrio, Monterey, or Mimata, like Candidate Taylor or Stephen Slater so yeah I think it's absolutely inconsistent the real reason I think is just to break it down for you guys I'm not leaving Mr. I really think the reason and I kind of hear this from people who are in some of those meetings is the lawsuit that's pending and Robert Mercer is pretty openly he's pretty open in the press that he's been he's concerned about I have a quote here actually he's concerned about the limitations of freedom of speech of conservative students and he's active on campuses to enforce that something like that so yeah I think they're basically are saying that that's what's going on and I think it's on us it's one of these things I don't think administrators could just go ahead and switch things or they're going to get sued they have to have a movement behind them that gives them the power and that's us right so I think it's because people don't know what to do around these words freedom of speech and there's not like so many people mobilizing that they can get away with it and then administrators are sort of like I don't like you're going to put me in this position so yeah I think it's on us to make sure that our institutions reflect those values and not just look up the people who's it's just their job we have to create an environment where people recognize that you know these people aren't exercising the free speech there I guess like the last part of my question would be when I think of Seattle University of Washington a very liberal city a very liberal college are we that far behind that even they are allowing with Milo to speak yeah asking are we that far behind that even Seattle so this is tricky because this is deep the Pacific Northwest is a strange region and it's had a really extreme you know that they talked about the wobbly that labor groups that was doing free speech fights there were some of the most prominent murders of wobbly leaders were in Centrelia and in Everett both high profile stories at the time and you know the Klan was very active in the Northwest Oregon had it in the law books it's something like 2002 that no black folks should live there right so it's a weird place because I think I don't know for various reasons Grunge and Microsoft or whatever Starbucks so you can copy you have to be we have this like liberal self-image marriage and poverty whatever right so there's ways that that's true and there's ways especially around race that is really not true numbers show that King County if you measure by in a certain way by wealth and race within zip codes so you have to measure that certain way King County is the most economically segregated county in the country so it depends you know the attitudes aren't you don't hear people talk here necessarily or something but where the money's at and where it goes South King County has a higher murder rate than Haiti does right there's some serious serious inequality here and we have to deal with that and I think there's a weird thing I'm going to get a bit personal around this shooting in Michael that was my friend who was shot he lived but got injured trying to have conversations about this I think sometimes that liberal self-image really gets in the way so one thing I saw when I was trying to talk to folks and I you know just in the city or whatever about the thing that happened at that event at the Milo protest and my friend getting shot people kind of be like oh no that wouldn't happen wouldn't happen here and I'm like I mean I was there I was right there and this guy got shot and you can read in the newspaper like it happened and people be like no no no it's not a liberal city so sometimes I'll tell you there was a anyway yeah I'll just say that the sort of it would never happen here when it's actually happening right in front of you is this problem that we have because of that that image and I think the northwest it's a little more confusing in a lot of parts of the country because it's got it's very liberal in certain ways and I think it's also never dealt with race it's worse about race talk about what the question that the gentleman over there asked I feel like when we think about race in the context of American history it came from those around these people and people's higher power as you can see there's a lot of force put behind racism and teaching people these these certain kind of rhetoric but when we look at trying to alleviate the problems no one talks about so do you think there should be laws by the government to enforce teaching tolerance and diversity in schools to try to alleviate the problem because we talk about the issues but no one a lot before miseducated about race and what's actually going on in America like a lot of us we don't know what's actually happening and I feel like there's not enough the government's not taking enough responsibility since a lot of the problems they've created to try to alleviate the problems or any other ways and means to try to fix the issue really powerfully put I mean I got mixed feelings about that I think there's sometimes the programs like that can be great I mean I think it's really great the programs the programs we have like that here for example can be really helpful but across the board before I would advocate as that as a major thing I would like to see the government I mean the government I don't like to say the government it's like saying the media or society it has so many different parts and contradictions but we have a lot of balls in the books and a lot of things that are done legally that are still really actively promoting structural racism so I'd like to see those things change first before we focus on education I mean on you know government-wide showing people about diversity or whatever in educational institutions that's what we're here for right so yes here absolutely but do I think that's the main solution we've seen with Black Lives Matter that there's things immediately where accountability and unaccountability and the structure of a lot of officials the fact that in the United States if an officer commits even if it's you know found guilty of committing like a unforgivable infactional murder of somebody where there was no excuse or something by law like they're not they don't get in trouble it's the department that pays it fine that's a structural problem in every police department that's also not individual officers fault that's the way the laws are set up and the structure and union like the police unions and everything that's this whole thing that's set up I think changing that like Black Lives Matter has really raised awareness about changing things like that would maybe have a start having a real impact so education is important we're in an education institution you know I'm a professor here not the only part I think we need to change the parts that are actively still reasons in promoting inequality I don't remember if I can find the book you know I can look for it afterwards there's a book that just came out about government housing policies of the United States since World War II and you know it's not a coincidence that all the Black folks were living in the CD and that everybody is now like you know gets pushed south that's policy and banks that you know own money to certain neighborhoods to start businesses or fix up houses and red line and not blowing money to other neighborhoods that's policy that's like that's like law and that's still going on even long after so I'd like to see those things change and if you change the material situation then you know that's going to change the social racism that happens because of it so I think yeah I mean education is great but other levels we need to look at too um relating to the laws and stuff if we want to look up and research where would we go how would we find out like which laws are racist or have racist tendencies to them where do we go so what I usually write about is social movements and I think here I'll show you my favorite book on this stuff usually this is what I talk about um there's a book that's like my bible called poor people's movements how they succeed, why they fail by Francis Fox kid probably have it in the bookstore here and according to them the way this stuff works is that you know if you have a cousin who's like out of a billion dollars if you'd like you know your friends with Robert Mercer then you have access to power if you have somebody that's like a legislature so you went to school with him you have access to power most of us don't and if you don't have access to that kind of power if your only power is like a voter every four years then historically the way that people poor people, marginalized people have power is by disruption it's by getting in the way of stuff getting in the way of stuff that makes everyday life happen and making an issue of it so what do we see with Black Lives Matter highway shutdowns if you keep shooting us we're not going to let you try to work what do we see with the first week of the refugee ban if you're not going to let refugees get off the plane and come home to their families and you're going to try to send them back to a country where they get killed we're not going to let you fly your planes and occupy if you're going to foreclose all our houses we're going to not let you have your bus stop in the middle of the city we're going to turn it into our new home so that's the trick and I think social movements when that's happening that's like ears to the ground and they come out with ideas and they tell you what's up faster than any professor would right so I think what have we been hearing from social movements recently we saw the immigration ban we saw Black Lives Matter is still going on so that's one place people involved with those movements people who are writing from them people like you want to come to Taylor that I mentioned people involved with these movements who seem to know what they're talking about they will point the way and there's so many people who are like oh yeah like this a lot of that so that's probably where we've been starting beyond that specifically like that book I can see the cover I can't remember it's called The Color of Law so oh my god half like Ray's in the room half like Ray's in the room yes sorry I forget so he answered your question is go to the library and ask like Ray because they know all these things this is a particular book that I've heard is really excellent it just came out and Amazon just crashed so so we'll see what goes to housing dollars do you see the little X down in the right hand corner oh yeah open the there we go this is a book thank you my marines are magic so that's a book specifically that just came out about this the new Jim Crow is the classic book about how this stuff worked around mass incarceration and the war on drugs by Michelle Alexander that's extremely important book so I think those two would be really good to start and then like I teach my research classes you can look at the bibliography of this one and see what they read and read those books so everything you have to talk about today is very important but what is one take away from this presentation today um you know I'm serious I think you know last year this time was extremely scary thinking about that protest I think I got shot that was a really scary moment and now looking back after a year you know I'm not sure things are quite as scary as they look I just read that there's another good book that just came out called Fire and Fury and this guy lived in the White House this whole year and everybody everybody in the White House hates each other so much that they would just run to this guy and be like you would believe what this idiot said today and they just all talk trash on each other and then he wrote it all down and it's a book which I was able to read and it also means that the last year it seemed like there was this master plan in place it was really scary and it was kind of true and that's kind of falling apart so now I think we're kind of in this what now moment right what now I have no idea but the same stuff that's worked in the past finding each other and thinking about where your recordings are at like you're never going to run with that I do think we need to take really seriously like how scary stuff is we're not making this up I'll say I've been involved with protests and stuff for like 30 years and they were so long where I'm like this is a good issue okay I'll go to that march, I'll go to that meeting I'll talk to this person but you know it's not like the real it's not like the real issue whatever it's like this thing is important but it's not the heart of the matter suddenly like the last couple of years the stuff that's coming up that's like the core of our problems it's on the table now it's never been on the table like it is right now and then you have a reaction to that where people are like I don't want that on the table take that off the table so the one take away point maybe it's like how about let's keep it on the table let's keep it on the table until we like deal with it and you know like sometimes that happens pretty quick if you're surprised for a good life that but one more question I mean anything's great so I see everything that you're discussing about and it seems like what the bigger problem is and the biggest problem is pretty much money that's what it boils down to so how do people actually come back enterprises and individuals and corporations that fund this type of thinking because somebody mentioned about government and talk about education and things like that but that's what it is these lobbyists have their hands in the pockets of the politicians and they buy this type of thinking and so at the end of the day yeah it's great to have these discussions and things like that but until we actually find ways to come back these powers that have deep pockets as you know being a black man and seeing everything that is kind of like it's overwhelming and I just want to find ways to actually just have these types of discussions but also find ways to actually divert the money into people that actually will make changes and actually will stand up against these corporations and these powers that that be absolutely that's such a great point to end on I think there's two directions to that one is that the money behind this we forget about that so for example since we're talking about racism we forget that the reason racism got invented is to legitimize people getting enslaved and people getting robbed of their land it was the two founding acts of this country in some way and racism was made to say that that's okay so that's a money essentially underneath it all slavery and colonialism where these things happen from money and then afterwards you have racism to be like no but it's okay though because they're not really human so in a way that we kind of lose that tie between the money that you know is motivating stuff and then the social phenomenon that we see and so we want to go back and remember that that's what we know behind it like you're saying so that's a really good point the other direction of that though this is kind of some Marxist metaphysics weirdness it's like what's money except like a very powerful symbol of social power money is just a way of showing social power so things that we value as a society get a lot of money because that's what money means so things that we decide as a society we don't value we can start taking that money away and I think one way I told you about protest one way that happens is when like I said like that book says poor people interfering with that reproduction cycle that hits the money pretty quick this is MLK week I'll end it with tying it back to what MLK did MLK talked about having a dream MLK talked about reconciliation he also talked a lot about power and he also stopped the money he got in a way he cost certain people a lot of money with boycotts with all sorts of like barcades with stoppages embarrassed the business class of these cities until they're like okay we can't afford a part-time anymore how about we ask this guy to a meeting and see what we can do next so we can start making money right that was a big part of what he did he read his stuff he says this he's like this is part of his process was economic direct action so one side of it is to see the money behind society the other side of it is to see the society behind money and that when we decide our values and we stand up for them then ultimately the money just follows where that goes and take a lot of work and take lunch and it's a struggle but that's ultimately the money goes along with what we believe and stand up for Erin, please give it up