That moment when I defended a speaker I'd never actually heard

I was about to sign a petition to bring this commentator to our campus, then my roommate played me a 3 minute clip from his podcast where he literally said student loans should be forgiven only for 'certain demographics.' I had been arguing about free speech for someone without knowing what they actually stood for. Anyone else ever almost backed a speaker without doing the homework first?

2 comments

2 Comments

calebw5015d ago

That "watch 10 full minutes" rule is gold. I'd take it even further though - I try to find like two or three different clips from different years of their work. A lot of these speakers have one hot take they recycle, but if you watch something from like 2019 and then 2023, you'll see if they actually changed their views or just polished the same bad argument. Like I did that with a guy who was big on "personal responsibility" for student debt. His 2018 clip was just bashing lazy kids. His 2022 clip was him literally saying the government should forgive loans for people who went to "real schools" but not community colleges. Same core idea just dressed up differently. So yeah, don't just watch one thing. Watch their evolution. It tells you who they really are.

riverhill15d ago

Ugh yeah that's rough. I almost signed a thing to bring a "free speech advocate" to my college once. Then I looked up one of his old speeches and it was literally just him ranting about how trigger warnings are "ruining the youth" but he had no examples or evidence. What actually helped me was making a rule for myself: before I share or sign anything about a speaker, I gotta watch at least 10 minutes of their full unedited content first. Clips can be super misleading but watching the whole thing tells you everything.