welcome everyone this is a panel that has been organized by the american association of university professors university of washington chapter a for short and we've got a huge panel and i want to give you a brief introduction to everyone who's on it and then start hearing from them in turn for you know seven minutes per person about the events on the inauguration day before during after this shooting and about what they think we should know about it or give the media a more detailed introduction before we hear from them directly but there are current you dub students on this panel jack pickett alan michael weatherford ruby byrne as well as you double loans but let me also add that we invited a few additional people despite how large this panel is there are so many people we want to hear from about it and it seems appropriate to say who chose not to appear the lawyer for the accused shooters chose not to appear so on that note let us turn to our panelists and while they're speaking i encourage you to think of questions that you want me to pose to them later and to write these down on index cards and circulate them to my fellow  members who have volunteered to help collect them and get them up here so that i can ask as we go our first panelist today is jack pickett he's a software at the university of washington studying political science and spanish he's a member of the u doug college republicans and he sits on the state board of the washington college republican federation jack was the youngest delegate from washington state the two thousand and sixteen republican national convention and this summer he'll be an intern in the d c office of congressional representative dan newhouse i would like to start with jack and with the events that his group conven when my professor colleagues were discussing the appropriateness of a response of some sort to this event i suspect that many wondered and one even emailed our list to ask directly what was the reasoning for inviting a speaker with the reputation for generating conflicts i think jack is going to help us understand this now and i also invite him to share anything else that he wants us to know i will like a b said my name is jack pickett and also like you said i just completed my first year at the university sophomore and credits i guess and i have been a member of the college republicans for the last year and all those other things that he said just to get started i really want to thank the a b a and amy and everyone else i know put a lot of hard work into this panel i think this is a really important conversation for us to have in trying to you know move on from events  like those that occurred on inauguration night and to really improve our society so i do want to address the question that i'm sure most of you in this room have as to why the coll republicans invited my oh and i'll get there i will i promise within seven minutes if i can but first i want to just talk a little bit about free speech and why it's important especially on a college  campus and i'm sure it seems pretty intuitive to most of you but i think sometimes we miss some of the details so i just kind of want to talk about that real quick so the first reason that free speech is important is because it allows you to be who you are it allows you to express what you feel and what you believe and if you can't do that if you can't express yourself and express what you believe from my point of view life is essentially  meaningless in addition the right to free speech is the key to all other rights that we possess as human beings and as americans it is the foundation for all liberty because it allows us to voice our concerns and to protest abuses of power it protects it protects us in more ways than one it's also a protection for minority rights the governing majority as a result of the first amendment provision of free speech cannot silence minority opposition the reason that it's particularly important on college campuses is because college campuses are the place where discourse and discussion hopefully open discourse and discussion and debate about conflicting ideals is supposed to occur and the reason that we hope that those debates  college campuses is because college campuses shape the leaders of tomorrow the changes we want to see our society achieve start right here in places like the university of washington in rooms like kane one ten  and with the advent of safe space culture and free speech zones that discourse is being threatened and that's not good for america and that's not good for our future as a society so the big million dollar question why did the college republicans invite when he has such a controversial reputation well first of all you need to understand the context of the situation  we were aware that milo was doing a nationwide tour of the colleges in the united states and he became very well known in the months leading up to january twentieth when he came and spoke here and he did chief quite a level of notoriety and being the largest and most prestigious university in the northwest we felt it was only appropriate that he should visit this university a speak to our students we also knew that he would attract an audience and as an organization on a college campus one of our goals is to grow our membership and spread our ideology that's the goal of any political club and so by bringing my little we knew that we would be able to make contact with people who we otherwise might not ever get to speak to the most important point though and why we invited milo was because we wanted to make a very specific point we wanted to challenge the notion that you have the right to be free from speech that you disagree with or that is offensive to you whether you love my or hate him whether you agree with him or find him up owing he has a right to say what he thinks and what he believes most conservatives and i am one of these conservatives would agree that even if i vehemently disagree with you or something that you say or believe i will fight till the end to protect your right to say that what you believe and historically this is been something that our country has been unified around it's a hallmark of american democracy and the idea that this generation wants to silence any idea we disagree with is troubling to us and we wanted to push back against that idea so that's what was meant to accomplish now obviously the response to milo was violent and that's troubling and disappointing to all of us including college republicans but we're going to continue to advocate for free speech because it is so vitally important to the success of our society in our nation the solution is not to silence people that we disagree with but obviously something has got to change so what do i think has to change what's what's next how do we move on well i can sum it up pretty simply we need to respect and honor each other even when we vehemently disagree with each other we can't just sit behind a screen or stand behind a mask and say terrible things about people we disagree with we need to return the humanity to politics and that's because change societal change institutional change any type of change happens at the speed of relationships there is a person on the other side of every ideology even the ideologies that we most disagree with and we've got to remember that fact and we have to make individual individually and we have to make the decision to respect the humanity of those we disagree with because when we when we dehumanize everyone we disagree with that reduces the legitimacy that true evil exists in this world and it diminishes our ability to stand against it united when it does occur so  thank you very much not in the least for keeping to i think we're going to go on to a number of other speakers but before we do  i want to share something that inspired me from a book about having crucial conversations and this sounds like i don't know after school special kind of stuff but it's worked for me so well that in a tough situation like this i can't help but say it because when a crucial conversation happens it's very hard to use this thinking rational part of our brains to do it and this book has a formula that works for me you say what do i want for myself and what do i want for this other person and if this is what i want what should i do right now and every time i'm really in an emotional space in a conversation i think at first i think i want me to win and i want them to disappear from the planet and i want to execute that dream and then that's not really what i want so that's why i like this formula so much because then i say no no no that would be an unacceptable approach really what is it that i want for me and i just put that out there in case it's helpful to anyone else enough about me our next speaker is a michael weatherford and if you could pass the mike down to him michael is a graduate student at the university of washington and a member of a w d u the academic workers for a democratic union which is a caucus of the grad student you work for a member driven union for all academic student workers despite not attending the event on january twentieth and not taking part in any protest during the event alan michael was harassed following the event f participation in a guerrilla teachin held in ota guarded library on the same day he described his experience in a guess that it's oriel in the daily untitled being harassed in the wake of milo this sort of harassment makes me think hard about the limits of speech and i'd like now to give alan michael a chance to tell us about his experience and also to tell us what he thinks we need to know when we consider how we can do better in the future thank you thank you so i have a little something prepared here that i was going to read so the question of free speech is at base and intellectually bankrupt project that because of its framing shifts the focus from an analysis and understanding of material labor i'm currently not interested at all in the mediocrity and lack of analysis that the college republicans leverage and even relish and in fact i think our intellectual inquiries and projects are better pursued elsewhere and have already been so yet we have continued to ignore them free speech is a liberal device a vestige of the european and lighten ment created in response to the unchecked power of monarchies in other words it helped give birth to and protect the individual from the government today however it is used in co opted by conservatives and especially the right to rationalize violence against minorities folks i have had  conversations with people that want to talk about this yet have either read little to no work on the matter and if they have they typically refuse to acknowledge the lived experiences and even the scholarly work of those most affected by it in fact i would like to point out the composition of this panel as a case in point there is a lack of representation by those who are most affected and disproportionately so i am speaking in particular about undocumented immigrants feminine identified and  people of color what has happened to me in my case of doc singh is actually a daily occurrence for others who do not share the privileges of my own position ality more over their voices go completely unrelated and unheard it is cultivation of ignorance and rehearsal of the free speech debate that i want to forgo i want to reframe our thinking as an issue of labor a part of the contradictory demands of liberal capital as it pertains to minorities to people the questions primarily posed for this panel were quote what did we learn and what would we do differently in part i think these questions are to be quite blunt a slap in the face to so many who have already put in that work that intellectual labor yet we have chosen to discount and ignore that work a symptom of liberal capital's contradictory logic i want those of you here to think about how much  critical legal studies critical race theory black feminism and queer of color work you have read and actively use in your own scholarly endeavors and daily interactions i want you to reflect on how much the labor of your fellow minorities faculty members are reflected in their pay and their recognition as scholars i want you to ponder how the lack of you citing them contributes to the systemic exclusion of their knowledge production i want you to focus on the contradiction of liberal capital that once m yet does not substantially engage with their work build off of their findings we use them capitalized on their as that acts as a means to sell diversity on our brochures programs newsletters emails and events yet do not give that money back to them at all in the age of neoliberal multiculturalism we bring in minorities folks to produce knowledge even about their own communities yet we do not want to provide the resources they need for their material support especially when they come under fire we set up the conditions for as in my case the very real harassment and threats of death and then rationalize it i was brought here to the university to teach the courses that i do to do the research that i do yet when very blatantly attacked i am told that i am quote unquote too public and there is nothing anyone can do i am told that i am limiting free speach it is this logical contradiction of liberal capital of again bringing in minority votes for labor with the abstract promise of protection yet the full on denial of material support that not only produces violence but rationalized as part of that rationalization is the denial of history the assumption that our current moment is one where we all come to the table together on equal footing however we do not acknowledge whose house it is that we enter who spent the time building the table who set the agenda and whose knowledge production we are all educated in to be explicit we do not acknowledge who has built the state or the university who spent the time building the laws or the rules and regulations who set the terms of the debate and whose knowledge we were all educated in but we are the inheritors of a colonial system of exploitation we do not all come to the table equally we exist in and through power if you want to know what really happened we set up the conditions for someone to get shot for our most vulnerable to be left to their own devices and then we rationalized it we look to them in the face after so many voiced their concerns and actively turned away and then we convened a reactionary panel never listening to the screams of those being most affected in order to further  including the recent article what is free speech anyway as a journalist covering this event she's had a chance to talk to a variety of people who were present during the event and she also has the job of thinking these things through and writing them down so i was not here for the actual events that transpired outside of the miley an op was talking about evening but it was everywhere the next day there were people pointing fingers and there were people looking for someone to blame and i think that that's a natural reaction to that and we have to acknowledge that that is a way that we react when things are out of our control and and looking at all of th have had my i feel like my thoughts about free speech and looking at this event have been kind of all over the map as a journalist part of my job as bolden is enabled by the first amendment and free speech it allows the freedom of the press and so that to me is a vital part of the construction of our country however as a woman of color and as a woman in general  the ways that free speech limit us and also leave vulnerable populations such as other folks of color as well as plus individuals in vulnerable position  to be exploited and or harms looking at the shooting at the i guess if i want to go any further i want to give very much due credit to make harder and steve military at the seattle times who broke the news concerning marco go on and his wife elizabeth hold on a and just generally trying to unpack what the heck happened that evening and i got to look at this from the outside which is a challenge in of itself just trying to make sense of what happened and also putting it into context to understand how this makes sense in the current country that we live in  i think for a lot of us we're scared and we are looking for ways to capital our resist right and i think that that's a noble endeavor especially when you are concerned about the person who is in charge of this country and the people that his presidency has emboldened one of the things that i think that the university could have done better i don't even want to start arguing about  why or how we could have prevented milo coming here because that happened but looking ahead at potential other speakers who could be coming to the university in the future i think it's important for us to us and for the university to recognize that they are a home for these vulnerable populations that they are a home to undocumented students to international students to queer students and to many others who are affected by the presence of not even conservatives but right wingers who come in from across the country to participate in these events and i think that that's a real issue and we're seeing not at the berkeley protests that have transpired since april we see people come in from across the country to participate or at least be in the audience of these events to stand up for their rights which you address and i think while people do you have the right to exercise exercise free speech i think universities also have the responsibility to acknowledge that these types of groups do come in from across the country to band together and to give vulnerable students adequate warning that that is happening and although ana marie cox a the president of this university did mention multiple times of your blog posts and emails that this is happening the university has to stand up for free speech as a public institution i think that the university and heard ministration could have done better by those role vulnerable students by giving them proper notification that these groups were headed the thank you so much anderson and to me trying not to editorialize that we can hear so much from our panelists but this just connects so much to the challenge of how do we let's call it their extreme political but i'm going to continue with speakers and take up your time excuse me and our next speaker is ruby byrne and if you could pass the mike to her i would appreciate it she is a p candidate fit in physics at the university of washington and she's also a union representative for the graduate student union and she was present at the protest as a protester i greatly appreciate her being here today to tell us about what she saw and what she experienced at the event as well as the other things she thinks that we should know for thank you hi everyone again i'm ruby byrne yeah this is my first time speaking on a panel i wasn't really sure of the format would be so i don't have a well prepared but i'm going to say something then hopefully be brief so yeah i did attend the protest as a protester i had heard about milo and about his speech i was particularly troubled by his speech at the university of wisconsin when he outed and targeted a trans student there and the harassment she experienced as a result of majlis speech led her to withdraw from her university so i thought the moral obligation to attend the event on january twentieth to protest his speech because i think that kind of hate speech is completely unacceptable and i think as jack noted i wanted to express myself and what i believe because i don't want my life to be meaningless anyway so on that note i'm glad we're having these discussions but it also seems pretty surreal to be here speaking about this on a panel in which the lawyer for the shooter was invited but there were no students of color invited no trans students invited and no immigrant or undocumented students invited so i want to be very clear that these are the people who are most affected by these situations on campus and so i'm here to  speak sort of second hand to the sorts of oppression that those people face but i want everyone to understand i have a lot of privilege as a white person on this campus so yeah just making that very clear from the outset  so i think the probably most valuable thing that can happen right now is for us to talk about concrete ways that the university can protect marginalized people on this campus and those are people who are marginalized by their identities and are further marginalized by university policies that put them at risk so first off i want to talk a little bit about the police response on january twentieth which was severely lacking so when we see a lot of the protests that are going on with protesters and counter protesters it seems pretty typical that the police form a line between them and try to separate them anyone who was present on january twentieth knows that that was the opposite of what the police did they made a friends around both the milo at attendees and the protesters and then use their bikes to violently push protesters into the crowd of people lined up to see milo so this was you know it just made a tense situation much more volatile hisle and was very unhelpful so i was when the shooting actually occurred i was standing pretty far away i didn't hear the gunshot or anything like that but i heard calls for a medic for several minutes i was standing right in front of a police line so i know that if i was hearing those calls the police certainly were as well after several minutes of hearing these calls i sort of meandered over to see what the situation was there had still not been a police response to the fact that there was a shooting and they didn't show up for several more minutes once they did respond to the shooting there was no attempt to communicate to the crowd what was going on so there was a lot of confusion and fear about that there was no active shooter protocol followed there is no attempt to detain the  shooter and the crime scene was not cleared so when i left the scene later there were literally people walking through a pool of blood on red square so it was extremely upsetting and it's affected me very deeply and i can only imagine how much it's affected hex the victim of the shooting and his loved ones but i also want to tie this into a greater climate on campus in which police are used to kind of solve all  safety concerns on campus and you know p d has a known history of racial profiling and biased policing this is something that has been addressed for years long before i arrived there being criticised for liking literacy and racial equity in queer issues there's been no response to many calls by students to have better training around these issues furthermore when people come to you deputy with an issue that is not something the police can address they're not appropriately referred to the folks who can address those issues so an example of this is safe campus safe campus is a non policed alternative to promote student safety on campus up until recently it was severely understaffed with something like one stop person is very proud that they have gotten safe campus staffing up to full staffing level whatever that is but now many of the other resources that safe campus is supposed to refer people to are severely understaffed so someone with a problem will go to a safe campus and be referred to an office where no one is there and essentially this is been a big problem for people accessing the resources they need on campus furthermore has done very little to protect international students who are affected by the travel bans this is something that my union is working on right now there's been no attempt by the university to reach out to these students after the travel bans have been if in fact the only message coming from the university is that th students should not travel so my union is attempting to earn protections and are getting basically nothing from the university anyways so those are some of the points i wanted to make  essential you that have been a lot of issues with students and workers on this campus being targeted like alan michael being harassed having unsafe circumstances in their classrooms and i think the university response has been really egregious and not insuring these people's safety thank you started a boutique law firm focused on technology and internet law clients and it's really great to have you as a legal panel legal expert on our panel today i want to ask from your perspective and from an a c l u perspective what is it that you think we need to know and if you can specifically what are the considerations that we need to pay attention to since we're a university and since we're a public university at that well thanks for having me on the panel i am probably a poor substitute for the defense lawyer who was invited and you couldn't participate but a quick thirty seconds on me and my background i'm a lawyer kind of a garden variety first amendment lawyer which  thankful to be i mean it's a fun incredibly interesting area of work and i've done cases ranging from politician accused of lying under a false political advertising statute was a green party candidate to bust advertising dispute involving israel foreign policy bus ad that was pulled out after a protest to a photographer who was detained for photographing power lines and in my private capacity as a non a c l u lawyer i was also can generally involved in a game or gate case that kind of spilled over into washington one of the kind of participants in in the whole episode actually moved to washington from boston and sought a restraining order against this this guy who i think kind of was originally was the initial subject of everything and i represent bono and sort of saw the attempt to get a restraining order against him so my speak my efforts kind of spam the political spectrum and that's definitely one message that i think it's important that i talk to jack about before the panel which is you know free speech is not a left right or a democrat or republican issue it's kind of a just an issue that spans the political spectrum i think alan raised some really interesting critiques about the system and  interesting lee the language of the first amendment is he is marketplace based or marketplace driven and so i think his comments were thought provoking and deserve deserve a second look but that speaking agents as they do other lawyers who who work for them as far as my take on this i think i come from a classic more speech is better point of view and you know speech is most effective when it stirs people into action and the idea that a speaker can be disinvited from a university because people don't like the message he or she spouses is deeply distressing to me and i'm sort of surprised there's not more of a visceral negative reaction to it it's just i think the the slippery slope effects are just you don't even have to think about it i mean i think the kind of speakers that get disinvited range the spectrum from you know pro palestine you know speakers to what have you and sort of depends on who raises the biggest hue and cry and who the institution decides to listen to is results and who who ends up being disinvited so i think i really want to resist the idea  that we can disinvite people because we don't like their message but i acknowledge it's a complicated issue and i don't think it sort of so black and white that we can just say there and stop it that i think peaceful protest is is obviously acceptable and important and as is decorum but you know what i come down to is that to the extent that people use a negative reaction to try to get rid of a speaker that easily translates into viewpoint discrimination and which i think is a very core first amendment value which is the person in charge could today did decide they don't like milo but tomorrow could decide they don't like hillary clinton and so i think that said i don't want to to sort of cast aside the effects of the speech i think there are a lot of harmful effects of so negative speech and i don't want to minimize it but i don't think especially for a milo i don't or somebody who fits that bill i don't think disinviting him is the appropriate reaction that's not to say that if he's doc saying or he's working on a coordinated campaign to engage in particularly harmful acts directed at somebody he should be held accountable for that but i really really worried about the idea of conflating what these these other acts that occur with well let's just disinvite him entirely and i think i would urge everybody to take a really close look at when we hear stuff about you know people being doc stand  out and i think we have a good example of somebody offering a first hand example here in the audience i think a lot often gets lost in translation and to the extent milo has actually done something he should be held accountable but at the same time  again i'm really uncomfortable with the idea that he should be disinvited just because you know one of his associates might have engaged in an activity that you know is harmful is admitted li harmful and i think the  spillover effects of to the message are really difficult from a first amendment standpoint something i really worry about as far as what the police could have done differently i think can i brought up good points that keeping people separate is important and educating and training law enforcement or whomever is involved in the efforts to keep the peace are is really important and i think something i touch on in my practice that's that's really interesting to me that i wish i had more time to think about is how the internet changes things and whether that's organizing a far flung protest or barraging somebody with messages that i know journalists who you know get routinely death threats and that's not necessarily something that maybe happened ten years ago or twenty years ago so i will admit that that that might change the dynamic and i think that warrants additional thought so i don't have any good answers i think but i come from the typical more speech is best and particularly in a university campus that's an institution of learning where the debate of ideas is what keeps people shawn is a professor of english at highland college and he's a graduate of the rhetoric and composition program and he's an author most recently his author of the book nonviolence what it used to be an armed insurrection and the rhetoric of resistance and sean i think that i might be like many others in my intuitive support for free speech kind of way a c l u and the college republicans think about it and i think you're someone who's thought deeply about this and perhaps come to a different conclusion then this sort of intuitive spot where i start so i'd like to know what you think we should know that is actually a little bit similar to the way that i approach free speech i mean it's sort of hard to say like i mean you know anybody is against free speech but it's also really hard to say what we're talking about when we're talking about free speech so i think what i want to try to blow through in the next happen is some reframing of that really is going to thinking about it one thing i guess i would start with is just to think about some of the consequences because i think speech is consequential speech is generally already in action and just like we judge other actions we might have to take those into account some of the things that i would claim have some things that have happened on campus since twenty eight that i believe actually are kind of directly linked in people participating in these and suffering these things have have l things that happened i know about and things that i'm really not reported and sort of scattered so i think a lot i don't i don't even know half of it i think i know a grad student who approached me and said that she left because she had a white supremacist student who said when the shooting happened he was going to do the same in the classroom and she sought help from the administration and they told her to see a counselor her car windows were smashed out and when she attempts to get recognition of that they can dismissed her so she left her ph d she walked  away another student i know refused her she's really looking forward to entering a medical program here and then after the change in culture of the last several months she's like better not actually considering particularly for students the atmosphere of the climate that we're with michael obviously i would recommend everybody here before they pass judgment read the article that he wrote for the stranger about what he went through gnome sort of fascist sympathiser on center with a six inch knife screaming and as far as i was reprimanded on m r e hadn't not heard of the event when the protest there's a number of undocumented students who were threatened they were actually running for a government office and they were threatened very publicly with death threats and rape threats repeatedly they took those to ministry those were dropped flyers went up on a campus with pictures from latin america in the seventy's when leftist organizer students were were drugged had their stomachs lit up and were thrown into the ocean from helicopters and there were flowers all over campus i kind of wonder how older faculty from latin america felt seeing those  a lot more maybe i'll stop with those i don't use my whole time so i well we also i mean in oh i'm sorry i have to do one more story and this is emblematic and i think this really gets to the question about free speech that we're hearing about there was also a performance of as you like it with the majority of people of color cast during the performance a lot of you may have heard this performance the theater was plastered with was we pasted with flyers from the group out i'm often  that said yellow black and brown get out of our town seattle needs an ethnic cleansing the you know p t when they faced when they were faced with those they said well we're free speech campus so some people like that some people will not but that's up to them to decide if they don't like it they should stay away from it so i'm going to claim that actually free speech has always had you know love it or hate or free speech is only so just like anything else because it has limits on the meaning of it and i would claim for example that last one is just absurd to claim is protected speech by any measure even a very liberal law and not taking the radical standards here incidentally that group out i'm off and the p d was very proud to host the flyers of was just found one of the members shot and killed two members yesterday in florida and they were found posting they had they had radioactive materials used to make a nuclear weapon in their home you can read the papers about that was yesterday and sneer but it's their supplies look it up in the papers that's what we're talking about i mean there's so there's consequences with this stuff there's also i could talk this whole time about this up to the top but in the greater seattle area there was basically a link eighteen year old black muslim teen and immediately he was found hanging like thirty feet up clearly a lynching type murder i'm assuming we'll find out someday by a nazi type but the police and f b i is that it was probably a suicide despite the objections of his family and the conditions of it the mosque was burned down locally repeated with holocaust denial and bomb threats made to synagogues jewish community centers you know and people are connecting these to the atmosphere that was opened up with inviting milo so that's the first thing we have to think about is what are the actual consequences and do we judge this as we as we judge of their actions i'm going to freeze through i used up most of my time telling horror stories i have an extended quote from here i mean i think the thing is it's not just exceptional like all the time people don't get to talk that's normal jane hall is a big place it's expensive and it's not like a lot of people have a lot to say a lot of people have stuff to say that would like to hear the difference is a difference between a platform and the legal right to free speech the first amendment guarantees that the government is not go was threatened with being disbanded as a group because they had more than three signs up on the lawn i know people there was locally josh harper who was sentenced people are sentenced to prison for far pressured not to talk this happens routinely i want to bring up very clearly maybe this is a good thing to end on without saying the half second half the things i want to say the game or gate controversies or there's a really good example by protecting the right of the of the people of the making the death it's we use these magic words to cover up what the actual content is what the actual conversation is and with milo i mean i remember a time when when liberals were saying you know obviously you can't have holocaust and it was obviously you can't have an cain hall of the ku klux klan rally or something i don't actually i'm not even sure what the standards are anymore and i'm not sure that people would argue we couldn't ok i would love to talk more about this the q and a thank you very much i'm sorry there's one more point i have to make this is we're going to link up sorry colleges also limit speech all the time this call that this campus does every campus does happens routinely and usually there's not objection to depends who's usually there is not lawsuits but robert mercer threatening to to you know the tough economy colleges have the right to limit time place and manner and to not allow events that interfere with their educational mission so what they're for their educational mission to educate students anything that materially interferes with that is not protected speech this is all sorts of precedent law for this when the united at your going to be quick when the university of washington decided to talk and decided to protect this speech far more than many other events he was saying that it doesn't see the place of marginalized students students of color students as part of its educational mission whether meant to communicate that or not that was absolutely the meaning communicated by that legally thank you thank you very much thank you and i think we very likely will be coming back to that because the idea a challenge but the implementation of these ideals even more of a challenge so a deep breath i'm going through a number of these atrocities and thank you for calling them to our attention because  think so often we don't even we have one more panelist who has not yet had a chance to share their views and i want to thank you all for staying with us and staying engaged through these many different views that we've had on our panel our final panelist is john walker and john is a member of the industrial workers of the world which is also the group that the victim of the shooting hex was working with and john was at the protest when hex was shot and has been in frequent context with contact with hex during hexes recovery i think that one of the most surprising things for a lot of people here is that hex the victim of the shooting does not want anyone to go to jail for this so john as much as you can speak for somebody else i want you to tell us first of all i want you to tell us what you think and what you think that we should know but i hope you can also tell us more about what real justice would look like for heck's for this hero in my opinion who nearly lost his life in this inciden night and two what's gone on since then as far as the conversation on justice and the criminalization of it all i had only been in seattle for about a year and been involved with the industrial workers of the lot of community defense and so we knew that there was going to be a speaker on campus who was going to be saying a lot of things that we didn't agree with i had no intention of coming no connections to you dubs and no history here but i started the evening out going to the g twenty protest downtown is kind of neat i guess kind of got over with really fast and then i heard that some of our members might be coming up this way  so hopped on the lincoln and made it up to the university and just by happenstance ran into hex and we ended up walking up to campus together and we just kind of caught up and talked about what we've been up to and sure enough within the hour the protests started to get going pretty good there are a lot of people there i've been it's a big protests was probably one of the bigger ones i'd ever seen and sure enough it got very  volatile i'll say that a speedy and you don't police did quite a terrible job it was one of the one of the worst deescalating spaces i've ever seen in my wife and seemed like they were just about  to let anything happen so i had been with x for the majority of the event he had decided not to mascot and there were quite a few people there  face coverings on for their own protection of their own choosing whatever their reasons are but he also has been art of actions before and it's not something he wanted to do he specifically has decided to take on the role of deescalation throughout the event and if you don't know that's just so essentially safeguarding the space making sure people aren't getting beat up aren't being pepper sprayed aren't having these violent events happen to them helping to mediate between people when things go wrong both between two different groups and within your own group i i was kind of a little bit across the square and that's when we had first identified an individual who was pepper spraying people kind of on mass and funny enough he was also identified right behind the by all of the s p d that were lined up right behind  us we vocally heard them mark him by his hat and then and then not in usual fashion we turned around and asked them if they wanted to come through and take care of the situation and they declined the offer they didn't want to go into the crowd at all and just another example of that within a about another half hour when we heard the shot i didn't see it i saw the smoke go up but and then within a few minutes after that we found out it was hacked he was shot and he was lying there and medics came to him there were protests medics there to take care of them and they were trying to get help while they were mending him and sure enough by the time the police did come over they decided the they  want medics on him they were going to take care of them so they drug those body onto a golf cart and drove it over red square to an ambulance he spent about the next month in the hospital and when the detectives came and asked him if he could help them out the what the criminal justice system can do to that type of community it basically rips it out from underneath is yeah it doesn't work  if anything the word it's the worst thing that can happen to a poor white community it's where a lot of the most hardcore races come from that's where people get involved in these prison gangs and they come home with swastika tattooed and they want to commit racial genocide and white separatism and it just perpetuates violence in the community and so if you've seen that and you've lived through it you know that the system doesn't really work for anyone we talk a lot how it affects the black community in a brown community and absolutely disproportionately it does but if you're involved in it and it's going to affect your community no matter what and so hex called for a restored of justice process he if you don't know understand what that means it's a way in the community can come together and figure out how to bring the perpetrator of a crime and the victim of a crime and deal with it between themselves and have a conversation about that without actually involving the state which kind of is a perpetrator of the crime in itself and if you were on campus it was a perfect example of how nothing worked here you have over one hundred police and the whole thing fell apart and so he also wanted to have a restored a conversation with president couch say that never manifest and the reason you can't have a restored of process with his of the people who have shot him or who the person who shot him was because we live in a system where people are so afraid to talk to each other because of the lawsuit or because of any other aspect of our legal system you can't you can't even have that conversation but it does exist restorative justice is a process other countries have it you can meet with someone who has committed a crime against you and you can begin to build those relationships if you don't have that then you just have a perpetuating system of violence constantly so that's about all i have to say about it i want to thank you for that john and i want to thank everyone on our panel again let's give them all a hand again