Unknown Speaker 0:00 We don't have a problem with ideas, we have a problem of understanding how to win. Unknown Speaker 0:06 It is about winning. Nothing else matters. If you want to take your state back, if you want to take your country back, you're gonna have to roll your sleeves up Unknown Speaker 0:25 you're free to say whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that the speech is not Unknown Speaker 0:32 part of the way you operate. A place where there's constant open discourse, constant expression constant dark. Unknown Speaker 1:01 Welcome to the maroon weekly special report on Steve Bannon his invitation to speak Austin want to give us a rundown? Assuming you didn't have your head in the sand. Obviously, you saw that Steve Bannon is coming to speak to campus. Unknown Speaker 1:13 On Wednesday, January 24. The Chicago maroon broke the news that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon had accepted an invitation from booth Professor Luigi Zingales to speak at the University of Chicago. Within hours of the announcement, the Administration released a statement affirming the university's commitment to free speech and student outrage erupted on social media. Early the very next morning, you Chicago, young democratic socialists held a protest outside booth in opposition to professors and Galis is invitation about 100 students from across the university attended and I got a chance to hear what they had to say. Unknown Speaker 1:48 Just say who you are, how you're affiliated with Sam Joyce, sem JY CE cochair. You Chicago y DSA, it seems like you had a very short amount of time to set this up and you got Unknown Speaker 2:01 at least 100 people out you got the news networks with their TV crews. How did you go about organizing that from like the students getting people to go out? I sat down at 730 and just started messaging everyone I know in groups like oh loss groups, like OBS groups like you Chicago socialist Student Action, just trying to get everyone together last minute. Just trying to reach everyone with a network and have them reach out to everyone they know if students can stand together and stand against this, that I think the university has a serious chance of reconsidering their decision. We have power. Let's use it. And my name is Sophia levar. I am the treasurer for the Chicago IDSA. That's young democratic socialists of America. I'm a second year. And I was helping to emcee the protests today. This This protest is is about the invitation to ban and however, Unknown Speaker 2:52 tied closely aligned with with that is the multitude of other wrongs that the university has recently engaged in Unknown Speaker 3:03 the grads to grad students United there. Unknown Speaker 3:06 The difficulty of organizing the faculty Faculty Forward, this is simply the most recent wrong and so while this is an act of protest against you've been and it's hard to protest anything on the Chicago campus about bringing everything else into it, yeah. Unknown Speaker 3:27 Then on Friday, Booth School faculty over Samantha Isla Driscoll who works at Booth Stigler Center and at the time worked as senior editor for the Stigler centers blog pro market tweeted out a statement announcing that she had resigned from the pro market editorial board, citing a violation of her recusal from the Steve Bannon event. After discussions later that day, Eiler Driscoll and Zingales released a joint statement which read, Samantha voluntarily decided to step down from the board at the pro market blog and to assume the position of managing editor instead of senior editor. Luigi accepted this resignation. Samantha will remain working at the pro market blog with otherwise unchanged responsibilities and salary. She will just recuse herself when banner related events are concerned, we look forward to a continuous and productive collaboration. Both Samantha and Luigi reiterate their belief that it is important to protect the right of free expression of university staff. On Saturday, I sat down with Samantha and Chicago maroon news editor Pete grieve to discuss the situation. They were in podcast section would like to note that we reached out to professors and colleagues that have not heard back the marine news section did hear back from professors and Galis, who redirected us to his joint statement published by Samantha on Friday. My name is Samantha allergy school. I am an economics editor by profession, and have recently started working at Chicago Booth Unknown Speaker 4:44 at the Stigler center, a Research Center for Political Economy as the senior editor they're working on publications and also on the Stigler centers blog, which is sort of like a freestanding publication called Pro market Unknown Speaker 5:00 Running the blog and doing content development on the blog, essentially sort of like acting as editor in chief and sitting on the editorial board of the blog. Unknown Speaker 5:09 So I oppose the Steve Bannon event. Unknown Speaker 5:14 From the very beginning, as I mentioned in the letter, I kind of laughed it off initially. Like, hahaha, No, you wouldn't do that. Like, you couldn't believe that. No, I couldn't believe it. And then I and then I was months ago, yes, months ago, I would think this is probably November, okay, when maybe he first brought it up. Unknown Speaker 5:31 And, Unknown Speaker 5:33 and so like, my, my opposition was muted. But I mean, it was clear, like, and everything, I think Luigi already knew me well enough to know that, like, and so and the reason partly my opposition was muted, because I thought that he might be trying to provoke me. Unknown Speaker 5:47 Given that given, like, what he knows about my values and things like that, and a friendly way, though, right? Not like trying to be a jerk about it. Yeah, no, I mean, he's not a jerk at all. It's just that, you know, there's this sort of healthy, the healthy, like pushing, reaching out people's politics, you know, perfect. Like, he knew that I have, like a background in, like progressive activism when he hired me, and he sees that as a good thing. Unknown Speaker 6:12 Given how, like, rigid, I think economics can be in general. And so like, we push each other ideologically, and that's good. So I tried to I tried not to overreact. And he, he just, you know, he pushed forward, inexorably pushed forward, forward, forward. Unknown Speaker 6:28 Like, I, the rest of the team, were telling me giving me updates, oh, my god, he actually like invited man in and Oh, my God, ban and accepted. And I was like, oh, no, what do I do, and I called my mother and my brother, who have helped me move here, because I moved from him out of the country, because I've been living away for 10 years. And they forbade me from resigning. But like full scale, that was like, my first response was like, I can't think of anything else to do but to resign, and they were like, No, you can't do that. You have to try to think of a way to make this work. Unknown Speaker 7:06 And, and I mean, I like I said, I didn't want to resign, I just didn't know what else to do. Like, I was just like, I'm gonna be implicated in literally something that I think kills people every single day in this country. Like, I feel like this is this is harm caused directly by my own employers. And I know that they don't see it that way. But I do. And I'm not sure that the fact that they don't see it that way, like exculpate anybody? Yeah. And it's not just that you're associated with this event, you have to work on you to work on it. Yeah, I work on all of our events, like, often intimately. We invite authors, and I have to read everything that the author's written, whatever it is about book articles, whatever, write up all the questions, I don't want to give away lychees came to said, let people know that I often have since I've been here, written the questions for, like, interviews that we just done with other authors and things like this. So I have to be like, oh, and we also interview, we are in many cases to interview the speakers and post post the interviews on our blog, in advance and promote them and like have to be tweeting about this event and events and all this stuff. So I would have to be intimately involved in this. You didn't want to be Steve, Steve Bannon spokesperson, well, no, I certainly didn't want to like I don't know. Like, I don't want to spend any brain space at all on Steve Bannon. Like, I want to be like, using my personal power to like forestall Yeah, the growth of not not been particularly about white nationalism, you know, because it's not a person. It's not about a person. It's about it, this ideology that is really sinister. And, like dangerous in this country. When it came out that it was going to happen anyway, asked to be recused, the request was granted. Unknown Speaker 8:48 But then violated, whether knowingly or unknowingly fired my bosses. They said that they didn't realize that they were violating it. Unknown Speaker 9:00 And when I went to human resources to ask if I had any protections, for conscientious objection, or like any, like basically what rights I had, because I wasn't sure. Unknown Speaker 9:16 They told me that I don't really have any rights that Unknown Speaker 9:20 the freedom of expression principles that the University of Chicago is so famous for, don't apply to staff. They apply to faculty and they applied to speakers, and they apply to students, but they don't apply staff. University spokesperson Jeremy Mann game released a statement to the maroon Sunday saying that staff members are free to express their personal views. Any change in the staff members work duties must be approved by that person supervisor with review and approval by human resources. And then so you're thinking about that you're like, well, here we have Steve Bannon coming to campus and he has more rights to freedom of speech than me right. Yeah. A lot of problems with that. Well, yeah, I mean, I don't I certainly don't like it. Like Steve Bannon has Unknown Speaker 10:00 Having more rights than I do. I know that he would like to. Unknown Speaker 10:04 But like, it wasn't the problem was not necessary. I mean, like, eventually the problem sort of transcended Bannon because it like, created, like, the nature of my job, particularly as like working as an editor and like sitting on an editorial board requires the ability to have, like, free debate without fear of any kind of like retaliation from Unknown Speaker 10:26 the people I work with, you know, and so I like, like, after like ruminating for a few hours, like, I mean, I fell asleep. Obviously, after the meeting with HR thinking about what to do, I woke up the next morning just being like, Oh, well, I can't do that part of my job anymore. And luckily, the way that my job was compartmentalized, Unknown Speaker 10:46 I could I can withdraw from the board and still be able to do like executive things related to the blog, like take care of, you know, publishing the content, I can still write, you know, like, there's like, a lot of things that I could do. Like the majority of my job, still in the absence of like sitting on the board and being involved in the arguments that we have to have, when we determine like, the ideological orientation of the publication and like the content that we're going to run and how we're going to frame it and whose voices we're going to feature. This is all controversial. We argue all the time over which voices we should include and like the people get ditched all the time. This idea that like, literally everybody should have exactly the same platform is antithetical to the nature of their to the existence of my job, like I, you know, I reject articles from their submissions every single day, because Unknown Speaker 11:36 clearly, not, not all speakers have the same voice value in terms of like the content, like they're, you know, they have the same rights, obviously. But like that, like my job is not about their rights. My job is about you, who you give access to, to a platform. And so, like the whole way that the banning event is being framed, Unknown Speaker 11:57 it misses the platform thing. They just like, totally, they're just like, oh, speech, and I'm like, Well, no, he can say whatever he wants, like, I'm not interfering with him saying anything, I just don't think that he should like be given a microphone. Unknown Speaker 12:18 So yeah, I had really, really thrilling negotiations yesterday for like two and a half hours with my, with my boss, and with the senior administrator of the research center, and with the HR guy booth, Unknown Speaker 12:29 basically, all the terms that I asked for, or I didn't ask for it, really, I just like, I don't want to be on the editorial board anymore. And I will do this, I will do like, you know, executive or managerial functions. But and I want my name off the masthead. I didn't say that in the letter. But I did ask the editors for that. Unknown Speaker 12:48 Would you agree to all of it, he agreed to protect my rights, conscientious objection, he Unknown Speaker 12:54 agreed to allow me to be involved in Unknown Speaker 12:58 protests, to the extent that I'm not you doing it on work time. Unknown Speaker 13:03 But the reason that he also like, invited me back onto the editorial board, I rejected because I, the reason that I resigned is not something that he can change, right. And that was what HR continued to, like, emphasize, that leaves you may be my I might, just so happened to work with someone who decides to grant me the right to free speech. But that doesn't, like contractually, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. contractually, he could change his mind at any time. But it doesn't help anybody else, you know, who would like to be involved in protesting this? And like, fundamentally, it's a university policy that HR reiterated over and over again, like that's not up for negotiation. So we wanted the joint statement, he kind of wanted to, like, make public comments. And in exchange for that, he agreed to go with me to talk to the dean at booth Unknown Speaker 13:53 and try to bring up this issue of like staff freedom of expression, but at this point, only restricted to the, to the booth or sorry to the Bandon event. But hopefully leading into this larger conversation of like, how protected are the people in our in the Chicago community? So I don't mean to sound because so he's advocating or he's always helping you have that conversation. But at the same time, he's saying you can't, he doesn't want you to express your outrage. Well, this is funny, because like, he didn't he wouldn't run my letter. I asked him to read my letter. Yes, the promarket blog, I asked the editorial board, and the day before, we had just one big statement. And I opposed running it, but the rest of the editorial board overruled me because they said, We don't block. You know, we don't censor the members of our own editorial board. But then, because I had resigned, he was like, Oh, well, you're not an editorial board member anymore. So we're not gonna run it. And I was just like, oh, well, still, that's like inconsistent with your own principles. And he was like, I think he just wanted to contain the Firestorm. Yeah. Because I also before Unknown Speaker 15:00 Like, try really hard like fought really hard to try to get them to publish my letter before we posted or like to add the joint statement to the end at least so that there would be some sort of context for bro pro market broke blog readers. Unknown Speaker 15:13 But he would not hear of it. And like he just wouldn't even consider it. And so I like I thought it's out and it's circulating and it's still circulating. And then oh, yeah, and it ran in the reader. And I've just heard from the reader that PR at Booth called them straightaway yesterday to say you need to update the story on submit this letter because this situation is resolved. And we're like, what? Since what I mean, she was like that it's like they they like wanted her they wanted them basically say like this is a nonstory anywhere like no the issue of like freedom of expression of university staff is totally on the table. And your new titles now manager managing editor promarket Okay, yeah. Unknown Speaker 16:04 Do you think it being a debate format, like validates opinions more like how does the professor's at Booth feel like how this plays? Well, I feel like they tried to they came up with the debate idea to sort of like, assuage people like me who were opposing, but the idea of it being a debate takes as a possibility that he might come out victorious, like having made white nationalism look reasonable. And that's unconscionable, right? Because it causes harm. Right? And so, like, by making any debate format, you have to take him at his premises, because like, that's what you're arguing over. Right. Unknown Speaker 16:46 And that's an ethical problems, I think it would be easier in terms of like, deniability of our like, our moral responsibilities here like to just give Steve put Steve Bannon on a platform and give him a give him 10 minutes to say what it says Peace, you know, because we could at least like point and laugh or whatever, but like to debate him. There is a false equivalency implied from the outset. So I just want to read you the statement that Professor Zingales gave out and just like hear your opinions from this point of view, so he says, and this is all on a Facebook post he put out, I firmly believe that the current problems in America cannot be solved by demonizing who think differently, but by addressing the causes of their dissatisfaction, hate cannot be defeated by hate, but only by reason that what do you is an incredibly shocking thing, mostly because he misappropriated Martin Luther King. Unknown Speaker 17:41 I just don't even know if he realized that he did that. But like the whole, like hate cannot be driven out by hate. It has to be driven out by love. I was like, he doesn't say that. He's quoting Martin, but he doesn't. Unknown Speaker 17:51 I don't think that he realized he was quoting Martin Luther King, but the fact that he's sort of presenting himself, this is a gambit to like give a voice to the disenfranchised, without realizing that he's quote, misquoting Martin Luther King is itself concerning. This is like, terrible, terrible white savior syndrome. I think you mentioned the phrase intellectual hubris earlier. Yeah, I think that's yes. I mean, like when Malaysian issued the statement, he sent it to me ask, like, what I thought or whatever. And I replied, saying, like, Do you really think that Nazism can be defeated by reason? Like, do you think that we could have avoided the Second World War by having more conversations? Like, there is no empirical basis for this belief that hate can be defeated by reason? Like there is none. I mean, they're just talking about it's like an article it is literally like, almost like a quasi religious belief amongst people that like, oh, we can talk or Nazi friends. And I don't think I think that not only is that not true, it's like, it actively is creating more harm done to people like last year, like the number of white supremacist murders doubled in this country. And like in the past 10 years, like the majority, the vast majority of like terrorism has been done by like, far right extremists. For context, a US Government Accountability Office report from April 2017 sites of the US have suffered 85 major terror attacks since 911 73% of those attacks are committed by far right wing violent extremist groups, and specifically 45% of incidents were committed by white supremacists, to act like this is somehow innocuous, and that we're just, you know, we're just having, you know, like a friendly argument over a couple of pints is morally irresponsible. Unknown Speaker 19:38 I don't want the thrust of this to be necessarily like no Bannon. Unknown Speaker 19:43 I really want it to be like, no white nationalism. He in the popular imagination is like conflated with white nationalism and the alt right, you know, whether or not like, whether, like the actual nature of his involvement is almost irrelevant at this point. Unknown Speaker 20:00 And like the my opposition to the event is about the normalization of the ideology. And so like, as a rule, I wouldn't say that we should like oppose, like individual speakers. Yeah. But, like, just in terms of like our responsibilities to our fellow citizens. Unknown Speaker 20:18 And given the particular like the particular violence being done in this country by white nationalism right now. This is just like the most it seems like an incredibly irresponsible move from like a moral perspective. Unknown Speaker 20:37 Make sure to check out the Chicago maroon ongoing coverage of this story and also the marine weekly is dropping its third episode tomorrow morning. Unknown Speaker 20:44 And if you haven't tried in planers recently added a ban and removed their menu, which consists of mop water served as a small dumpster i for 1am excited to check that out. I'm Austin and I miles and thank you to Samantha Island Driscoll Pete grieve and Grace Howard for being the voice of reason on this episode. Transcribed by https://otter.ai