Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Race, ICE & the "Woke Right"

Transcript

Race, ICE & the "Woke Right" · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans! Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. How do you keep enthusiastically supporting other people's right to express dangerous ideas that you really don't agree with? This is the pickle of free speech.
• 0:18
  Your opponents keep saying things that you hate. It's easier just to want to shut them up. Whether it is Trump dragging his enemies through the courts, or ICE agents kidnapping pro-Palestinian activists, or lefties being cancelled for mocking the death of Charlie Kirk, or right-wingers being cancelled for worrying about black crime,
• 0:39
  or James Comey being investigated for a photograph of seashells on the beach, or the Florida government banning wokeness in schools with the Stop Woke Act, which was just overturned by a court. We'll get into that in a moment. Or indeed, something as trivial as the brouhaha over the new film The Odyssey and its colorblind casting. There is so much going on, and today's guest has his hands full. Thank you.
• 1:06
  David Volodzko is a journalist and a victim himself of cancel culture during the peak woke period, and he now fights right-wing cancel culture. So he's sort of an expert in the phenomenon of the woke right as well as the woke left. He's a free speech defender. He spent most of his adult life in Asia, and he wrote for a bunch of English-language Asia publications. He went to hotspots and war zones, and after all of that reporting,
• 1:32
  He returned back to the United States and he became an editorial board member and a columnist at the Seattle Times for about two months before he was hounded from that publication by an online mob who was calling him a Nazi and he was fired.
• 1:48
  David is now a news editor and senior writer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. You may know that organization as FIRE. It's an activist group that defends free speech. He goes into bat for people who are being persecuted by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, as well as fighting the good fight for free speech in America across all party lines.
• 2:10
  His substack is called The Radicalist, where he writes about political extremism, philosophy, and history. And I began this conversation by asking him about a court decision that had just been handed down, defeating the Stop Woke Act, which was a piece of legislation that had been passed by Florida's governor to try to eradicate wokeness from Florida's schools. I hope you enjoy as much as I did. The one, the only, David Vlodzkoe.
• 2:45
  The 2-1 ruling, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals struck it down, which is something that fire has been the foundation for individual rights and expression, which is where I work. They've been working on this for a while. The StopWoke Act has led to all kinds of absurdities that you've probably seen. I mean, there have been some good headlines that have come out of it. I saw one not too long ago where I believe they removed Shakespeare from some bookshelves in some schools at one point.
• 3:15
  I think rather promptly put it back, but it's an indication of just, I mean, it was pretty, just sort of like move fast and break things with this. And it doesn't even feel... Wait, they thought Shakespeare was woke? Woke. I thought Shakespeare was the canon. He was white and male and probably straight.
• 3:34
  Woke, stop, yeah, the, you know, the Stop Woke Act is used to cover all manner of censorship sin, so to speak, and anything that you don't like, essentially, Shakespeare is very violent and sexual. And so some people think that that has no place in an education, or at least in a young person's education. And don't get us started on the fact that there were boys playing women.
• 4:00
  Right. So, right, exactly. Good point. And that's, so it's been going on for a while now where they've just, there's been this battle back and forth with censorship and Stop Book Act essentially just being used to, to just, to just be a kind of a cudgel in K through 12 schooling education. So, uh. And what did it do exactly? What was the, what was the act? And was it just in Florida?
• 4:24
  Yeah, it was just in Florida. Yeah, it was part of DeSantis' war on woke. Right. And the idea was that it basically just gave K-12 schools, it flagged certain kinds of content or terminology. So for instance, if there's any classroom curriculum that is, let's say,
• 4:49
  Seen to be teaching children that white students should feel bad about their whiteness. That would get flagged. But other things, as I just mentioned, have also been flagged, including, you know, works that are in the Western canon of literature. Right. And when you say flagged, what was the process in the Stop Work Act? Did it just mean that individual principals and teachers had the right to not teach things that the Department of Education wanted them to teach or what?
• 5:19
  Yeah, that's part of the problem with these kind of laws is that often it doesn't even get to that point, right? So because a lot of administrations just don't want to have to deal with the headache of the federal government breathing down their neck or the state government. So we've seen this in other schools across the country where –
• 5:36
  If the Trump administration, for example, makes it clear that they're coming after DEI, a lot of schools would just rather self-censor. Right. And then end up with a, I don't know, billion-dollar lawsuit or something like that. And so to a certain degree, some of the things that have happened...
• 5:52
  in Florida as a consequence of the StopWalk Act are not actually the StopWalk Act directly causing those things to happen. There's just a massive chilling effect that causes people to preemptively take measures to avoid the lash of censorship.
• 6:07
  And was it the case that Florida was, I mean, I think of Florida as fairly conservative. So was it the case that there were, I mean, I suppose there are more libertine districts where it's likely that there were schools which were teaching a whole bunch of woke claptrap. But basically the process was the state government passes the law that says you're not allowed to teach these kinds of things. And then each school district preemptively stops. Yeah.
• 6:36
  Well, or they're actually notified by officials. So it's not always the case that they're self-censoring. But to answer your question about, you know, I mean, this is Florida. It's a very red state. Are they even, do they even have anything to worry about when it comes to wokery, so to speak? To be fair, to steel man the other side of this, I would argue that, yes, I do think that to a certain degree, certain...
• 7:03
  woke is a sloppy, squishy term, but let's just go with it. Certain woke principals have found their way into teacher education programs. I mean, it's very common, I think, across the United States now that you find, so for example, Paolo Freire being taught Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he wrote that, being taught in teacher training programs. So yeah, even in Florida, you have
• 7:26
  It's a very red state, but you step into a classroom and the teachers may not be as red as the rest of the states. Right. I'm sorry, what's Fieri's contribution to education? Paolo Fieri was a Marxist theorist who believed that the only way to really
• 7:42
  bring about a kind of revolutionary struggle in any meaningful sense is, is to, uh, indoctrinate the children essentially with revolutionary ideas. He thought, you know, you have to instill these, you, you can't, it's sort of like debating, I suppose a modern equivalent would be like, it's trying to convince a Nancy Vaxer with a mountain of evidence. You're just never going to get anywhere. You're never going to get anywhere with an adult, um,
• 8:03
  If you're trying to revolutionize them and bring them over to the side of Marxism, they're already an adult. It's game over. But you can work with kids. That was his sort of insight. And that's crept its way into the education system.
• 8:22
  I mean, I don't like that, but I also don't like censorship. I don't think that's the right way to address that. I'm a big believer in the marketplace of ideas. So if we have Paulo Freire in circulation, I don't think that we should try to rip it out of circulation. I think that, you know, as has been famously said before me, the best response to bad speech is better speech.
• 8:42
  But when you have, I mean, suppose you have a generation of school teachers who are, I mean, I don't know if this is true, but suppose hypothetically that you had them and they'd all drunk the Palafieri Kool-Aid and thought that the best way to achieve a more just union in the United States was to teach children that America is a white supremacist state and that capitalism is fascism and whatever else they might have sympathies for.
• 9:11
  then because you're talking about an institutional system, like an education system, which is not a free market of schools, like it's a government-run institution, and because you're talking about children who don't, it's not like they're going to be given comparative literature about Fieri versus alternative hypotheses of pedagogy. Doesn't that come to the point where you go, okay, if there's an imbalance, then that imbalance has to be redressed?
• 9:42
  I think that, I think, yeah, there's a colorable argument there to be made. I would personally like to see that done in a more democratic process with teacher, parent, student unions and teachers, sorry, parents meetings, meeting with teachers, having those conversations, working out what they think the curriculum should be. It should be a conversation. I also think, however, that maybe the inclusion of Paolo Friere should have been a conversation. So all of these things, but for the state to come in and then say, okay, we need to
• 10:12
  remove this or we need to remove anything that essentially ends up being we need to remove anything that we don't like or it actually ends up being anything that isn't sort of Republican approved to a certain degree. And anything that we see as being a little bit too much woke, which has been
• 10:29
  bled into a much broader sort of just anything that's progressive or anything that's democratic, maybe, or that the Democrats are pushing. And that's where it turns into a different kind of a thing. And worse still, I mean, from the point of view of what you were saying about self-censorship, not only things that we don't like, but things that a school administrator or a teacher or a principal might fear that we might not like.
• 10:51
  Yeah, exactly. Hey, humans. Just jumping in here quickly to make sure you're aware that this is just a preview. This is just a brief highlight of one of our premium episodes. If you weren't aware, it is our very generous paid subscribers and channel members who help make all of this possible, and they get extra juicy premium episodes just like this one. You can become a member on YouTube to watch the full episode, or you can subscribe via our sub stack to get the entire back,
• 11:19
  catalog of mind expanding bullshit free uncomfortable conversations back to the show so what the what did the court find on what basis was the law struck down
• 11:31
  Uh, they struck it down on, uh, I believe on first and final principle that you can't, that you, that the state cannot come in and basically, uh, dictate to the schools that they don't have the right to teach. The teachers don't have the right, don't have that right of their curriculum over their curriculum to design their curriculum, which is a similar thing that happens at the university level as well. You know, professors having the ability to, there is a, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um,
• 11:58
  This is getting a little bit beyond my, the precision of my knowledge here, but there is a certain amount of leeway that teachers do have to go into areas that the schools have determined, like, okay, like, you're a math teacher. Like, what are you doing talking about Palo Friari in the first place?
• 12:13
  Like this isn't really censorship to say that you need to teach math. So that's fair. But there is this. But if a teacher were to, let's say, just let's say there's something in the news from that day and teachers just comments at the beginning of class or in the middle class. And they just make like one or two comments, but they don't drag the class off course. The students are not prevented from receiving the education in math that they're meant to be receiving in that class. Yeah.
• 12:37
  that's fine. Going off a little bit is fine. But if you turn it into, I don't, and this is, I don't really know where the threshold is here, but if you turn it into more than that, where you're actually now turning the class into something else, or,
• 12:53
  indoctrinating them to a degree there is a threshold there right that that and what about the expression of personal opinions by teachers like presumably the first amendment doesn't protect the free speech rights of a teacher who wants to go in and start railing against black people or railing against white people or talking about how jews or muslims are corrupting the
• 13:17
  Yeah, well, to the best of my knowledge, I think that there's time, place, and manner restrictions with regard to what you say and where you are and how you dress and K-12 restrictions. Like, the big Supreme Court decision on this is Tinker, and there's the Tinker Standard, which generally says, and this applies for student protests at the K-12 level, which is that.
• 13:42
  So long as you're not doing it to a degree that you're disrupting others because other students ability because free free speech is not just about saying what you want to say, but also about hearing what you want to hear. And as long as other students are not disrupted from their ability to still hear the speech that they want to hear from a speaker or sit in class and listen to the class. So a student should have the ability to say, like, I disagree with that, but they don't have the ability to stand up and turn the whole classroom into their own little lecture.
• 14:10
  Similarly, teachers, I think, have some leeway in the degree to which they can express their views, but they can't take it too far. And again, this is where the precision in that and where the line is drawn is outside my area of precise knowledge. So I don't know exactly how far they could go or...
• 14:29
  or how potentially offensive they could be before they would be restricted. I mean, it would be fun to test. I feel like there's a Sacha Baron Cohen sketch here with a teacher trying to push as much KKK ideology onto children as possible and see what the limit is. So, David, on just pulling back to like the big picture, the 30,000 foot picture of where we are, like as someone who...
• 14:56
  was previously a victim of censoriousness and cancel culture from the left and is now working at the coalface of the same phenomenon on the right. Where do you see things? If on inauguration day when Donald Trump was about to be sworn in, we had fast forwarded to today, would you be more depressed or more optimistic today?
• 15:23
  Wait, sorry, are you saying do I think that things have improved since he was elected? Or are they, not have they improved, but are they worse or better than you would have feared that they would be?
• 15:35
  I guess they are about as bad as I thought they might be. I thought it might be pretty bad. But to be clear, it's bad on both sides. It just takes censorship. Both sides like to think that the other side is really the problem when it comes to censorship. But both sides...
• 15:57
  The way it manifests has a different shape. It tends to be more, as far as I can tell, more political on one side. It's more acute in a sense. And on the other side, it's more chronic. It's more cultural. It's more broadly sweeping on the left.
• 16:27
  For instance, and cancel culture, when I was canceled, was almost exclusively a left phenomenon, unless I'm ignorant of some examples that I don't know about. But like it was almost entirely all the examples were just essentially woke leftists who were calling for the cancellation of politics.
• 16:47
  people for saying things that were offensive. Or in my case, literal Leninists who didn't like the fact that I criticized Vladimir Lenin by comparing him to Hitler. And then, but now- I mean, there were some examples during that time. I'm trying to think of American- I'm sure there were. But there was a famous example here where a commentator who was a woman of color made a joke about our national day
• 17:09
  Anzac Day, which was seen to demean Australian servicemen and women and the traditions of Australia and stuff like that. And she was so pilloried by the Murdoch press and by conservative commentators that she actually fled the country and went to move to the United Kingdom. I'm not sure she's ever come back.
• 17:26
  So there are examples like that, you know, of the kind of pearl-clutching outrage that you get when people trample on sacred, national sacred cows. But yes, I mean, the left was, you know, in the late teens and early 2020s, the left held a lot of cultural purchase. That's changed, though. That has changed out of the pot and into the fire for her. I mean, the UK has been as much worse than Australia, but the US. So, yeah, it was left. Yeah.
• 17:52
  that's no longer the case. So, I mean, I wouldn't say that they are the same, but one example is, for instance, after the killing of Charlie Kirk, we saw a surge of cries for people to be fired. And...
• 18:09
  people did lose their jobs because they said things or almost lost their jobs or lost their jobs, but then were able to get them back or because, you know, some of them were saying truly despicable things about what happened and they were celebrating and glorifying it. But I also saw examples where people merely retweeted something that he himself had posted and just as if to say, look at the kind of things he used to say. Mm hmm.
• 18:33
  And for, and maybe add a little comment like this is, this is who you're mourning or something like that, but not even, I wouldn't even consider that offensive. That's just jumping into the marketplace, having a perfectly reasonable point, actually even a good point. And I say that as somebody who's written about how I, you know, I'm very much in opposition to the kind of nasty things that were said about Kirk and.
• 18:55
  But even those examples were targeted. And to be clear, I only say that to illustrate how bad it got. But the really egregious, offensive examples also should not have gotten people to, I mean, you shouldn't be fired. Because if you believe, for example, I think Charlie Kirk was a horrible person. Or he was transphobic or whatever the case may be. And therefore...
• 19:23
  Well, just that enough was what got some people fired. Also, now there's another component to that, which is people also went so far as to say, yeah, good that he died. Now, that's also protected. So if you're working for...
• 19:35
  the government in any capacity, that should not get you fired for expressing your opinion. If a private company decides, well, yeah, we don't want you selling cars for us when people on the lot are going to know that you're somebody who celebrates violence, that's for them to decide legally they're not protected by the First Amendment in that sense, but it is for that company to make up their own minds as to whether or not they're in any kind of business that,
• 20:02
  that is adjacent to free speech and they have some responsibility to develop a culture of free speech. So, for instance, when I was canceled, like, that was a newspaper. I think they have a moral responsibility to defend free speech. But if it's a car dealership, let's say, okay, you don't.
• 20:17
  not as responsible, but still, you know, it's something for the other. Unless they proactively market themselves as like big bobbies, free speech autos, in which case they really should. People as just American citizens, I would like to think that one day we'll get to a point where all Americans feel that to some small degree it is part of their duty also to try to maintain and generate a culture of free speech. It's one of the great things about this country. But
• 20:45
  Yeah, or at least to be, I mean, I think as the dust somewhat settles on that moment of peak cancel culture culturally, I think it's like one of the things that was egregious about it that's worth our bearing in mind was just the speed with which the defenestrations were taking place and the baselessness of a lot of them, the way in which it was obvious that as long as you could gin up a mob on social media to sufficiently...
• 21:13
  threaten a company with embarrassment, they would immediately boot the person out. And for me, it's less, I mean, my not being the same kind of free speech, you know, crusader that you are, it's less about whether or not I care that someone gets fired from a car dealership for expressing sympathy for an assassin. And it's more about, I just want the owner of the car dealership
• 21:36
  to have taken a few days, slept on it, really thought about their values, thought about the value of the car dealership, spoken to the person about it, pursued every other kind of avenue, and then in the judiciousness of time to arrive at a conclusion rather than at 9 a.m. waking up and realizing that a whole bunch of people have been piling on on social media and calling the guy at 9.01.
• 22:03
  Exactly. But then, you know, we're talking about hypothetical car dealership owners, and I agree with what you're saying, but then it runs all the way up to the federal government and ICE, for example. Yes, so that's different. I mean, just before we get to ICE, just on the free speech question and the Trump administration's attack on it.
• 22:22
  The slipperiness here that I find dangerous, David, is what is an opinion and what is a threat or support for violence, right? And the administration gets very loose with this. So James Comey can express the opinion via an arrangement of seashells on a beach that Donald Trump has.
• 22:47
  should no longer be president, and that becomes a threat of him assassinating Donald Trump, according to the Justice Department. Or Don Lemon can be doing some reporting in Minnesota, and the fact that he was reporting alongside protesters means that he is a supporter of violence against federal officials and stuff like that. Like that, or the obvious example also being...
• 23:17
  Hamas sympathizes when, you know, pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses will be, you know, denied entry into the United States, as several Australians have been, because they're supporters of terrorism, when in fact, from their perspective, they're just supporters of an oppressed people, whatever, whatever it might be. What, where do you see? I mean, that looks like a dangerous and slippery road from afar. How do you see it?
• 23:41
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