This is the Cato Deli Podcast for Tuesday, April 4th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The desire among some college students to shout down and intimidate campus speakers may be troubling, so what drives the desire to muzzle

speech that we find offensive? Steve Simpson directs legal studies at the Iron Rand Institute

we spoke last week.

As I noted before we started recording this issue of camp speakers getting shut down on college campuses.

People who like Charles Murray, people less notable,

like Milo Yanopoulos and others,

and Christina Hoff-Summers, is somebody who's had to deal with some of that as well.

Or I'm not convinced that it's as big a problem as some people say it is, but it is a problem.

Yeah.

And you can see it in how people get speeches, successfully, get speeches shut down and don't

allow alternative viewpoints, sometimes odious viewpoints to be presented on college

campuses.

But I guess as you see it, what's driving the push to say that not only is the push to shut down these speakers good and right, but that it's moral.

Yeah, so I think there are a couple things going on here.

One issue, so there are really two issues.

One is, and we can talk about this a bit, whether there is a quote right to free speech on campus.

And the short answer to that really is no, but there's more to that so we can unfold that as it goes. But on the question of whether students should be shutting down talks, I mean the best case that the opposition, the people who are protesting people like Charles Murray are making is that I mean

number one what they're saying is this is our right to free speech so if if Charles

Murray comes on campus we think the guy is a racist and a white supremacist,

which by the way is false.

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