the proof is the experience they get into the word-of-mouth and testimony for sure. >> any other questions? >> at this point what we are going to do is i'm going to ask the authors too make their way back to the signing table and then kristy will come up and give everybody predictions on forming a line and how to go about everybody getting their books. >> thank you again so much. [applause]

the book is called panic attack young radicals in the age of trump. the author is the associate editor of reason magazine. who are these young radicals? >> activists who are causing issues on college campuses although you can find them in places like the streets of portland as well who are different from the kind of old left that was all about free speech, due process. what we are seeing now is a lot of attempts to shut down speakers who come to college campuses even the professors of the activist students who are purportedly on the left as well they say they can't have conversations with the students anymore, they risk offending them and if they do their job could be in trouble because they could be investigated.

it's changing the culture quickly and dramatically towards this cancel everybody that is problematic that has to be run out of public life and that is coming from this kind of activist contingent on the left. i spend a chapter in my book talking about the right which is a white nationalist group that has gotten some attention the last few years small in number obut loud and vocal and has hada huge effect in the realm of social media harassing people and making it unpleasant to be online. >> you say that the intersection is the operating system of the modern left. what does that mean? >> guest: it is a term that comes to us from sociology. it was used by a sociologist to describe how if you are a person of color historically you would have experienced racism and if you are a woman, sexism and so

on and so forth but you have multiple sources of oppression working against you so that theory makes total sense to me but in this sort of practice and activism you are supposed to give the most depressed person in that circle the most authority and veterans. only they can be the experts on the sources of oppression so it starts to get a little does this make me the most depressed person if i have all these categories working against me or what about these and also it lends itself towards i think an increasingly fragile mental health kind of activism on campuses because i see young people who i think are sort of exaggerating the extent of their ptsd. i talk to professors and they say everyone says they are a survivor, but it's probably doubtful that they are saying that because having ptsd gives you authority as an activist in the circles, so incentivizing people to see themselves as

mentally unwell which is a bad thing. >> how did we get here? >> that is an interesting and difficult question because we are talking about broad social and cultural change happening over the long period of time so there is no easy answer. i do think that the changing regimregime or the norm of safey culture in schools and in preventing have probably led to a generation that grew no fault of its own is a little bit more cobbled than the previous generations were less resilient. and again i'm not blaming young people for that. our schools have changed dramatically. if you were to go back to the 1970s couldn't find a police officer in a single school in america. today there are police officers and half of all public high schools. they are very safe. headlines to the contrary are misleading. they are the safest place for the longest period of time and crime has fallen dramatically. less at risk of kidnapping, all those things. but you would get the idea from going through school and seeing

parents arrested for letting their kids play by themselves, all those kind of things you get the idea that it's dangerous. so the purpose of schools to protect me and make me feel safe and then when safety gets stretched to include emotional safety as well, i think that's when you start to see this tide against words that wound or words that hurt i need to be protected from the same way the school is responsible for my physical well-being. >> host: in your view is this a good trend or not? >> i think that it's concerning an uncritical of the right as well and i don't want to be causing too much alarm because i don't think it is a generational problem so much that people are talking about small subset of a radical fringe however they are having a really poisonous effect on our social kind of discussion in the culture right now. it's miserable to be online. we are seeing young adult novels offers to co-authors canceling

box saying you can't say that that's problematic that's cultural appropriation we can't do that. it would've conversations being closed off just because a small number of militant radical people on the political extremes are saying so. >> you gave as an example in your book the movie, the documentary boys don't cry. cry. would have been? >> they invited as a very liberal arts college in portland they invited kimberly peirce was the directowhois the director oe groundbreaking film that exposed american audiences it's like to be a transgender person. the activist at this college shut down the event and wouldn't let her speak. they put up signs saying vital things about her.

she had what you would think would be a progressive film. she casted hilary swank. so having passed this position they hated her for that which is so shortsighted it wouldn't have been as big a film if it had someone other than hillary swank said that as an example being at each other's throats and self-defeating tactics that some of the activists are embracing because of the influence of the intersection audi. >> charles murray invited to middlebury college, he and the professor that invited him were both injured. >> they were literally physically assaulted by protesters who thought it was so important to stop what was supposed to be a debate between the perspective and the left of center perspective, but they don't want that to happen. when i interviewed for the book and said don't you think you

make charles murray or whoever r does look more sympathetic if you're shouting them down and using violence against them don't you think you are driving people towards them and they say we are about safety. we are keeping the marginalized people in our communities safe from the harm of the words and ththe view so if he's allowed to come here and speak we have contributed to the emotional or mental unrest of the people we care about which is kind of a different idea i think about how safety works as the root of so much of this. >> how small are some of these groups that are far on the fringe? stream at extremely small. at many of the events we are talking about dozens of people may be hundreds or thousands nationwide. they feed each other because the far right shows up and then the far left shows up and then they throw things at each other. the media is you don't want to

be ignored. the news is things that have beehappenso you kind of have tor them but the challenge is contextualizing them and not making these things seem like they are happening more often than they actually are but they are happening. there was violence against a journalist who writes for the online magazine. she is critical of the activities and they said he has no right to cover us and they beat him up when he tried to videotape what they were doing. they explicitly reject the idea that people who disagree should have rights or the far right should have rights. they are in a liberal and i believe it is catching on a little bit, not the tactics that the philosophy money enemy shouldn't have rights because they are my enemies. >> do you see a solution and do you offer one in a panic attack?

>> the best thing to do is to just answer bad speech with more speech to say i would like to hear someone come i would like to hear charles murray talk when the event happens for the other student in the audience by the way are the majority to just stand up and say no i would like to hear this. i want the professors, the left of center professors to talk to their students about the free-speech activism and not feel like they are going to be at risk if they say the wrong thing that is on the administrators to recognize the rights of faculty and so they don't have to arrest students or throw them out of the campus they just need to make a safe space if you will to actually be able to express ideas counter to the students and not have them suffer consequences for doing so. >> what are your politics? >> i'm a libertarian so i have ideological beliefs, but

interestingly it's sort of puts me in the center of some of the stuff because i'm sympathetic to some of the goals. i talk about black wives matter in the book. i agree with a lot of what they would like to accomplish. i think the criminal justice system is very flawed and has had a disparate impact on people of color. as iso that is from a position f occasionally wanting to left to succeed that i am critiquing their tactics saying this is going to turn people off or you are saying that you need only the most radically progressive people are the ones you want to organize the can't count as the good guys. it's going to be like six people at the end of the day. even you guys don't agree with that stuff. >> what attracted you to libertarianism? >> i kind of have a boring story. i grew up in a republican household but my parents were libertarian. i grew up in the detroit area. they were pro-business but socially liberal broadly speaking, and i eventually said yes but i am, then i found

recent magazine and now i work there. >> the author of this book is panic attack young radicals in the age of trump. thanks for joining us on the tv. >> my pleasure. thank you. the executive director of the sentencing project and the meaning of life published by new press. what is the sentencing project new? >> we are engaged in research and advocacy on criminal justice reform trying to describe how we can end mass incarceration and have a better strategy all around. >> over 200,000 americans are currently sentenced to life. how is this unique to the rest