645: My Effing First Amendment

Steve Kolowich

The first time Katie remembers having a strong political feeling was in high school, while listening to Rush Limbaugh with her grandmother. He was criticizing Obamacare in a way that really resonated with her. She became the kind of teenager who would write to her congressman.

She arrived at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, UNL, just as the 2016 presidential election was entering the home stretch. Most of her friends on campus weren't that into politics. She liked the idea of being connected to other young people who were just as excited about it as she was. Turning Point looked fun. Its founder, Charlie Kirk, wasn't much older than she was. And he was really good at Twitter.

Last summer, she went to her second Turning Point conference. This one was for chapter leaders. She met Charlie Kirk. She made new friends. And she came back to campus in the fall, fired up to spread the gospel of liberty and capitalism.

On August 25 last year, Katie tried tabling on campus for the first time on the plaza outside the student union. Turning Point had sent her a starter kit with stickers and buttons that said things like "Socialism Sucks" and "I Heart Capitalism." Her club wasn't official yet, so Katie wanted to do some recruiting.

Can you sort of give me your pitch? If I were a student coming up to your table, what would you say?

Steve Kolowich

Katie set up her table in the place where there is a lot of foot traffic, just like Turning Point says to do. And sure enough, along came a university employee.

Steve Kolowich

Katie stood her ground. She recorded the interaction on her phone.

Steve Kolowich

That video alone would have been a good get for Turning Point, confirmation that yet another college campus wanted to silence conservative ideas. But then, bigger game wandered onto the plaza, a full-throated liberal zealot.

Steve Kolowich

This is Courtney Lawton. She's 47. She's getting her PhD in English. And at the time, she was also an instructor in the English department, teaching freshman writing classes.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney had read about Turning Point and believed it was far more sinister than Katie's table made it appear. She first learned about it because of the Professor Watchlist, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Turning Point publishes the names of professors who have said things that are offensive to its values and puts their photos on the website. Offenses that can land the professor on the Watchlist include sniping at Republicans, being anti-Israel, writing too urgently about white privilege or the patriarchy, or saying the NRA is partly to blame for mass shootings.

Courtney knew of professors who had been bombarded with violent or hateful messages, and even placed on leave or fired after having their misdeeds trumpeted by conservative media outlets like Campus Reform. Courtney thinks Turning Point puts a target on professors' backs.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney left the plaza and rushed back to her office, grabbed some poster board and a marker, and scrawled a sign that said--

Steve Kolowich

When Courtney says neo-Fascism, she basically means the platform of the current Republican Party-- anti-abortion, pro-gun, hard-line on immigration. My producer Dana Chivvis and I talked to Courtney together.

Dana Chivvis

Can you be pro-Trump and not a fascist?

Dana Chivvis

Who did you write the sign for?

Steve Kolowich

She made the sign and went back to the plaza where Katie was.

Steve Kolowich

The student, Katie, was taken aback. She didn't go out that day to make a video of a snowflake. It was her first day. She says she really just wanted to sign up some students and try out her patter.

Of course, she understood this kind of thing might happen. But now she was in the middle of it, and it was kind of intense. And she was alone. And here was Courtney, treating her like some kind of race warrior.

Dana Chivvis

When they're saying, "no KKK," and they're saying you're racist, were you like, what the hell are you talking about?

Steve Kolowich

Courtney says she was using "KKK" as shorthand for "you're racist." She says Turning Point tries to provoke racial resentment in white people. And race is something they talk about a fair amount. Charlie Kirk, the founder, has called the concept of white privilege a, quote, "myth and a lie." He says it's a racist idea.

Turning Point also thinks affirmative action is racist, a point it tries to make by encouraging its campus chapters to hold affirmative action bake sales. They sell cookies to black students for $0.50. White students have to pay $2. All that, to Courtney, is KKK-ish.

Steve Kolowich

I've watched this one video Katie took a bunch of times, and it always feels awkward. Usually, campus protests involve large groups of people whose chanting and sign waving makes sense because they're in a crowd.

But in Katie's video, Courtney is mostly alone. She's pacing with her sign, calling out like a carnival barker. The plaza is huge and mostly empty. Someone on a bike whizzes by, tumbleweed style. Katie walked out from behind her table to get a better shot. She starts narrating.

Steve Kolowich

And then Courtney starts shouting.

Steve Kolowich

What's a neo-fascist Becky?

Steve Kolowich

That's Courtney, who's a white woman, by the way. I wondered if Katie was familiar with the term.

Did you know what that was?

Steve Kolowich

What was she getting at?

Steve Kolowich

Katie and Courtney circled each other, one woman armed with a cell phone, the other with a poster board. And then--

Steve Kolowich

You liked doing it.

Steve Kolowich

On her first day, all of these scenarios Turning Point talks about happened to Katie. Somebody had tried to kick her into a free speech zone. A triggered liberal who didn't want her kind on campus had called her names and accused her of racism. And she reacted the way Turning Point teaches its soldiers to react, by taking out her camera and filming.

Courtney knew she was playing to type, the liberal academic who cried racism. But she didn't really care. She was there to make a scene.

Dana Chivvis

Did she react at all when you flipped her off?

Dana Chivvis

What was surprising about it?

Steve Kolowich

Katie says that there were some F bombs thrown around at the protest, things like, it's my effing First Amendment or you racist eff.

Steve Kolowich

Did you say, "You racist eff?

Steve Kolowich

But there were F-bombs bombs flying around?

Steve Kolowich

Eff Charlie Kirk?

Steve Kolowich

Things were getting ugly. Katie was feeling overwhelmed. She didn't really want to be there anymore, but she also didn't want to leave. She didn't want the liberal activist to think they'd won.

A woman walking by saw Katie surrounded by three protesters. One of them was being really aggressive. Katie looked upset. The woman, who worked for the university, mouthed the words, are you OK? Katie shook her head no. Then she started crying.

Steve Kolowich

One of the other protesters was an English professor named Amanda Gailey. She wasn't chanting or swearing like Courtney. Instead, she stood off to the side and quietly held a sign that said, "Turning Point: Please put me on your watch list." It was a gesture of solidarity with the professors the group had singled out.

But when Katie got upset, Amanda decided to call a timeout.

Steve Kolowich

Katie gave Amanda a piece of paper and the professor wrote down her email address.

Dana Chivvis

Did it make you feel bad?

Steve Kolowich

Courtney felt differently.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney draws a line between her identity as an activist and her identity as a teacher. She says she doesn't push her politics on her students.

Dana Chivvis

Why didn't you take that tact with Katie?

Steve Kolowich

When Courtney looked at Katie sitting at her Turning Point table, she didn't see a student who wanted to sign up classmates for a club. She didn't see a student at all. She saw a professional operative from a powerful national organization that wanted to eradicate from public education the people and ideas she held dear.

Turning Point was Fox News. It was the Koch brothers. It was President Trump. This was an invasion. And the soft spoken teenager handing out "I Heart Capitalism" stickers was the tip of the spear.

The confrontation lasted about 20 minutes. Katie left the plaza, still upset. The protesters dispersed. And in another world, that would have been that. Maybe the student would have emailed the professor to clear the air. Maybe she would have lodged a complaint. Maybe an administrator or two would have gotten involved.

In any case, you and I wouldn't have heard about it. But that's not the world we live in-- at least, not anymore. Instead, the outrage machine lurched into motion. That's what people in higher education sometimes call it, the network of right-wing websites that have emerged to pounce on stories big and small about liberals behaving badly on campus. Student activists send up a bat signal so conservatives around the country can see it and come running.

That afternoon, Katie did interviews with Turning Point's news division and with Campus Reform, that news site with the student correspondents on campuses. She also tweeted her photos, including the one of Courtney giving her the middle finger. Her tweet said, quote, "Tabling for TP USA today and UNL faculty came to protest, screaming profanities. They won't silence me. I will continue to fight for freedom."

Charlie Kirk saw her video and huddled with his team. They slapped a Turning Point logo on the video and Charlie tweeted it out, with a note saying, quote, "Intolerant left strikes again."

That must have felt exciting.

Steve Kolowich

For conservatives who are anxious about campus politics, the University of California at Berkeley is Gomorrah, PC U, the bottom of the slippery slope. The University of Nebraska, on the other hand, is not typically a hotbed of political activism. There have been a couple Black Lives Matter rallies, and anti-abortion groups have marched there too. But Berkeley, it is not.

When I asked people if the student body was liberal or conservative, they usually said neither. That a lot of the kids come from conservative backgrounds, but that most aren't very political, one way or another. The protest was on a Friday. Turning Point sent up the bat signal, and by Monday, there were articles about Courtney and Amanda in the The Daily Wire, The College Fix, Gateway Pundit, and Breitbart. University administrators got messages from furious Nebraskans.

Steve Kolowich

Well, furious for Nebraska.

Steve Kolowich

Others were more direct. A guy named Doug Kagan, who runs a group called Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom, also wanted the university to do something about liberal bullies. And he wanted them to make some bigger changes while they were at it.

He suggested they eliminate some line items from their budget, including the women's studies program, the ethnic studies program, the LGBT programs, English as a second language, the diversity resources office, and money set aside for affirmative action. This is a good example of what can happen when Turning Point publicizes these incidents on campuses. It brings conservatives out of the woodwork with ideas about what the public universities should and shouldn't be doing.

Katie never emailed Amanda Gailey, the professor at the protest who had offered to talk. In fact, in the week after the incident when the local talk radio host asked her if any of the protesters had tried to engage in dialogue, she didn't mention the email offer. She told them, there was no dialogue. I stood there as they were hurling these insults at me. As the story was retold, Courtney's behavior on the plaza was pluralized in a way that made it sound a bit like Katie had been accosted by a mob.

Steve Kolowich

This is Hal Daub, a prominent Nebraska Republican who's on the university's board of regents. He's describing the scene on local talk radio.

Steve Kolowich

Katie was no longer just a young conservative who loved America and hated big government. She's now a free speech crusader. The right has taken up free speech on campus as a rallying cry, pointing to speakers who had been shouted down or had their events canceled by universities. Katie was another conservative who had been silenced by a liberal bully.

And so, two weeks after the protest, on another sunny Friday, she returned to the plaza, this time with a giant beach ball, a free speech beach ball.

Steve Kolowich

Why a beach ball?

Steve Kolowich

She had gotten the gigantic beach ball-- it's 12 feet in diameter-- from the Leadership Institute, the organization that runs Campus Reform. Page 39 of the Turning Point chapter handbook includes detailed instructions on how to run a free speech ball event, beginning with how to inflate the ball with an electric pump and how many people you'll need to hand out markers, take pictures, and help you roll it around campus.

Nebraska state senator Steve Halloran walked the seven blocks up from the capital to pose for a photo with Katie. By the time he arrived, the giant beach ball was covered in messages from UNL students-- fuck communists, fuck Antifa terrorists, fuck Hillary, fuck Donald Trump, fuck everyone who's funding this. The senator managed to find space for his own message-- "Thank God for our freedom of speech."

He and other senators had heard from constituents about Courtney's protest. They didn't like what they heard. Senator Tom Brewer wrote to the university president directly, quote, "This event is being watched very closely by the unicameral." In other words, we have our eye on you. Do the right thing.

The outrage machine had done its job. On Twitter, people called Courtney unstable, a loudmouth, a clown, a, quote, "tormented individual with an addiction to ignorance." 11 days after the incident, Courtney was called into a meeting with the university's executive vice chancellor, who told her that she would not be teaching anymore, at least not for the time being. Courtney wasn't being fired, the vice chancellor said, but the university was worried about her safety and the safety of her students. Courtney says the vice chancellor asked her if she would have done anything differently in retrospect. Courtney said no, no regrets.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney's protest on the plaza was nothing out the ordinary for her. She's an activist, mostly for gun control. And she's testified against bills in the Nebraska state capital before. It was her mother who taught her to protest. But it was her father, a conservative, who showed her how to never give an inch.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney says her father's politics borders on fascism. Still, she says they're very close. Inevitably, news of her protest made it to his computer screen.

Steve Kolowich

Some of Courtney's colleagues on the faculty did come to her defense. After she was removed from the classroom, about 50 of them held a small rally on campus, waving signs that said things like, "Don't gag our educators." The university had to answer publicly for what had happened. University president Hank Bounds went on a local talk radio show in Lincoln. The host, Coby Mach, speaks first.

Steve Kolowich

I have to say, one of the stranger outcomes of Courtney's protest was that it apparently sent the nice folks of Nebraska to UrbanDictionary.com in order to decode the meaning of "Becky." The definition that involves sex acts is not the first one listed, but it's definitely the one people gravitated toward. Courtney's rather academic definition, a white woman who weaponizes her white privilege, isn't on there at all. Regardless, the radio host thought she went too far.

Steve Kolowich

When President Bounds issued an official statement about the incident, he made this distinction. This wasn't about Courtney's right to free speech-- of course he supported that. No, this was about her lack of civility.

In any case, we can all agree that Courtney called Katie a mean name. And a bunch of conservatives in Nebraska were offended. Or maybe they were triggered.

There's this phrase we kept hearing while reporting this story, "Nebraska nice." It was a marketing slogan. The state tourism commission used it a few years ago. But people seem to take it seriously. It's the plastic on the couch cushions that keeps the political mud being slung across the country from leaving a stain on Nebraska.

Now, there are elements in Nebraska that threaten that niceness, that civility. After what happened to Katie, a former chairman of the state Republican Party, this guy, JL Spray, was worried about one threat in particular.

Steve Kolowich

Betsy Riot is this sort of underground, punk, feminist collective whose members often conceal their identities with veils or creepy masks. They're kind of like PETA, nonviolent, but pretty in your face and willing to commit vandalism to make a point. In Nebraska, the group had posted signs comparing the Boy Scouts to Hitler Youth.

Another time, a group of Betsys wearing sunglasses and surgical masks marched at the Nebraska state capital, carrying a tube of ointment the length of a sedan with a label that read, "Preparation H for the flaming assholes in our legislature."

Steve Kolowich

The blood was fake, actually. And it was found on the doors of both Nebraska senators after they said they would vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. JL Spray thought Courtney was a member of Betsy Riot, which I told Courtney.

And he thinks that you're in Betsy Riot. And he thinks you were involved in throwing fake blood on some senators' doors. Is he right about that?

Steve Kolowich

Are you in Betsy Riot? Is that something that you want to talk about?

Steve Kolowich

Are you a fan?

Steve Kolowich

I have checked it out. It seems like the kind of page you would like.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney, for the first time in the many hours we talked, had little to say.

Steve Kolowich

Remember earlier, when I said that Courtney saw a Turning Point as an invading force with Katie as the tip of the spear? Well, some Nebraskans saw Courtney as the tip of a different spear. They were convinced there was something far more sinister behind her protest, a shadowy force bent on destroying the Nebraska they knew. That guy, JL Spray, who thought Courtney was part of Betsy Riot, he put it well.

Steve Kolowich

The liberal bias of faculty is something conservatives have harped on for a while, and they're not wrong. As of 2014, nationally, there are more self-identifying liberal professors than conservatives and moderates combined. And in the last few years, the percentage of Republicans who say colleges are having a negative effect on the country has increased significantly to 58%.

Katie became a source for Nebraskans who wanted to know exactly what was going on in the hallways at their state university. And where she decided to go next was probably the most liberal hallway of the most liberal building in one of the most liberal counties in Nebraska. In October, the chancellor told her that what Courtney did was an isolated incident and she wouldn't be formally disciplined.

After that meeting, Katie started tweeting about the pattern of liberalism that she saw infecting the entire English department, Courtney and Amanda's academic home. She tweeted about signs on the English department building that said "No wall," "No ban," and "Resist." "Is this in a free speech zone?" she asked her followers.

She tweeted about the department's mission statement and its core values, which include, quote, "affirming diversity and pursuing social justice." "Are they teaching English or teaching students to be social justice warriors?" Katie tweeted. People noticed. Campus Reform wrote about the English department. And in Omaha, Chris Baker, a conservative radio host, also picked up on the story.

Steve Kolowich

He's wrong, by the way. All Americans have a First Amendment right, even the ones who work for Chris Baker. A public university can't tell its employees not to express personal political viewpoints. It can make certain rules about how to express those views. They can put reasonable limits on where you can hang a banner. But those rules can't be based on what the banner says. Teachers don't give up their First Amendment rights when they take the job.

President Hank Bounds went on the radio and defended the English department. He said diversity is something a university should strive for. But Katie kept her eyes peeled for evidence of liberalism in the English department.

A few months later, she took a picture of a sign that listed a bunch of different minority groups. It said, "Students of color, you are welcome here. Queer students, non-neurotypical students, Muslim and non-Christian students, you are welcome here." In the bottom left-hand corner of the sign was a woman's torso made of letters which spell, "My body, my business, motherfucker."

Steve Kolowich

It strikes me that what you're doing in the English department is to police what people in the English department say, at least in posters.

Steve Kolowich

Why is that wrong?

Steve Kolowich

Katie was offended by the effing poster and she worried that the English department was giving itself an unfair advantage in the battle for the minds of UNL's impressionable young students. Her new friends, the state senators, agreed. Senator Tom Brewer believed that the University of Nebraska should, quote, "reflect and respect the beliefs and values of all Nebraskans."

Senator Steve Halloran started working on a bill that would require the university to punish protesters who drown out free speech on campus, with harsher penalties for repeat offenders. If the bill passed, the university would have to create something called a Committee on Free Expression. Essentially, the committee would do what Turning Point did, report out any incidents where free speech was stepped on by anyone else in an annual summary for the governor and the legislature.

Senator Halloran invited Katie Mullen to weigh in, telling a local newspaper that she met with his staff at least a dozen times to talk about it. In January, there was a hearing on the bill. A bunch of people showed up to testify against it, including professors from UNL. Many testified that it would have a chilling effect on free speech at the school. Some alleged that the senators were trying to crack down on the speech of liberal faculty members.

One law professor said the bill was alarmingly vague. He worried that it could lead to the government influencing what teachers discuss in the classroom. And weirdly, that fear sort of came true right there in the hearing room. Senator Mike Groene, the chair of the education committee, questioned some of the UNL faculty members about the politics of the English department. Amanda Gailey was one of them.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney watched from the front row while Amanda defended the English department at this hearing that was supposed to be about free speech.

Steve Kolowich

Free speech is supposed to be one of the few remaining ideas in American politics that everyone can agree on. But free speech doesn't solve political conflicts. It creates them. Solving them requires more advanced tools like trust, humility, dialogue, listening. A law professor testified that the free speech bill was unconstitutional. And at the end of the day, it didn't make it out of committee.

But the idea of the bill, that there needs to be oversight over how public universities deal with speech, has taken hold around the country. Similar bills have been proposed in a lot of states-- Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, others too, all based on the same script developed by a conservative think tank called the Goldwater Institute. But political pressure does count for something. And before it was all over, the conservatives would win a significant victory against the university.

In the fall, Courtney was called into a meeting in the chancellor's office.

Steve Kolowich

Courtney secretly recorded it. During the meeting, Chancellor Green showed her security camera footage that captured her protest. He acknowledged that the protest went down exactly as Courtney had described. Then he made a confession of sorts.

Steve Kolowich

Still, he was hopeful that Courtney would be able to return quietly to the classroom for the spring semester. But then something else came up that put the university back on the defensive. The conservative press had gotten ahold of some emails sent between university officials in the wake of the Katie Mullen incident.

One retired administrator wrote, quote, "I don't think it's safe to be conservative on our campus. Too many faculty espouse their personal political views as gospel in classrooms where their views have no relevance." The university worried this would look like a smoking gun, proof that they were trying to de-hickify the students.

To get ahead of that potential scandal, President Bounds shared the email with every state senator and the governor, along with an apology and a pledge to study the political climate on campus. And Chancellor Green called Courtney back into his office.

Steve Kolowich

He assured Courtney that the decision had nothing to do with her scholarship or her teaching ability. She had gotten great reviews from her students. This was just politics.

Steve Kolowich

How did you feel when you left that meeting?

Steve Kolowich

Courtney wasn't technically fired. She was reassigned to non-teaching work for the spring, with pay, like a problem cop sent to desk duty. Chancellor Green told us the official reason was, quote, "potential disruption to the academic environment." He was scared her classroom might become a target for political agitators who wanted to keep the fight going.

Dana Chivvis

What was the hardest part for you about not being able to teach?

Steve Kolowich

The conservatives of Nebraska couldn't purge the English department of liberals, but they'd shown the university who is in charge. Courtney was gone from the classroom. It wasn't really the university's decision. It was theirs.

Steve Kolowich

A month later, at the Turning Point conference you heard about at the top of the show, the one down the road from Mar-a-Lago, Joe Walsh, a conservative radio personality, was giving a talk in front of a few thousand conservative students. And he asked Katie to stand up and take credit for her great work that semester.

Steve Kolowich

I want to tell you about one other thing that was happening on the UNL campus this year. At the beginning of the spring semester, a Nebraska anti-fascist group posted a video online of a guy named Daniel Kleve, a white supremacist discussing white supremacy with some other guys online.

Steve Kolowich

It turns out Daniel Kleve is also an undergraduate student at UNL.

Steve Kolowich

When the Kleve video went public, lots of people on campus were upset and scared. A few hundred students, faculty, and staff gathered on the plaza in front of the student union for an anti-hate rally. Members of the basketball team took warm-ups and t-shirts that said, "Hate will never win."

Some people called for the university to expel Kleve. The administrators said they weren't going to. He hadn't made any specific threats, and even hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. The university police force had done a threat assessment and decided that despite what he said in the video, he wasn't going to commit violence at UNL. There was no safety issue.

Meanwhile, when Courtney Lawton was first removed from the classroom, the university said it was because they were worried about safety for her and her students. Some people say it was hypocritical to allow a violence-loving white supremacist to keep going to class, when they had so quickly ousted Courtney Lawton for flipping the bird and calling a student "Becky."

Steve Kolowich

This is Michael Combs, a professor of political science. He's been at the university for more than 30 years. In February, the administration held a series of meetings where students and faculty could speak their minds about everything that had happened. Michael Combs talked about his fear, while Chancellor Green listened.

Steve Kolowich

Everybody wants to feel safe at the University of Nebraska. Michael Combs wants to feel safe from violent white supremacists. Courtney wants to feel safe from right-wing state senators. Katie wants to feel safe from radical liberal professors. They were all free to speak up about their fears, and they all did. But only one of them had powerful people in Nebraska come to her aid. Speaking isn't the same as being heard.