Freedom of Speech stands at the heart of American democracy—and yet it faces new challenges in the age of polarization, executive overreach, and digital activism. In this episode, David Ramadan is joined by former Congresswoman Barbara Comstock and Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, for a powerful discussion on protecting free expression amid shifting political tides. They unpack the constitutional implications of recent executive actions, the danger of weaponizing nonprofit regulations, and how universities can preserve open discourse while maintaining inclusivity. From Capitol Hill to the classroom, the guests reveal what it takes to safeguard one of our nation’s most essential rights.
Freedom Of Speech And Democracy: Defending Civil Discourse In Divided Times With Barbara Comstock And Walter Olson
Our conversation sits at the intersection of government power, civil discourse, and one of the most foundational principles in any democracy, free speech. We'll explore recent efforts to regulate dissenting speech, the legal and constitutional implications, and what this all means for higher education institutions like ours.
I’m pleased to be joined by my co-host for this episode, the Honorable Barbara Comstock, former congresswoman from Virginia's tenth district and founder of the Barbara Comstock Program for Women in Leadership at the Schar School. Barbara has been a dear friend for decades and was my colleague at the Virginia House of Delegates. We're honored to welcome our guest, Walter Olson, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and one of the nation's leading voices on constitutional law, civil liberties, and free expression.
Welcome to both of you.
Thank you.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
Unpacking The Executive Order On Domestic Extremism
Walter, start with you. What are the most constitutionally troubling elements of the executive order on domestic extremism and speech that President Trump issued a few days ago? You may please tell us a little bit about that order as well.
This was an order issued not too long after the public outcry and upset at the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, feelings were running high, and an executive order that promises a crackdown, somewhat ill-defined crackdown, what it claims are types of extremism and types of political speech and action that allegedly cause a climate of violence, which then cause individual violent people to act on their impulses.
These sorts of claims, which are that the government needs to address itself to cracking down on speech because speech leads to violence, are, of course, not new. Almost anyone who's been around has heard this from various sides at various times. This was actually a set of marching orders, albeit vague, as I mentioned, which suggests that the government will investigate and disrupt actions that they believe encourage radicalization.
Encourage people to rationalize violence or sympathize with violence, and tagging along our interesting, smaller portions with a lot of potential. Namely, that the government may seek to go after nonprofits that it believes have contributed to ideas of radicalization or to street demonstrations that turn violent, or whatever. That, of course, rings bells with those of us who follow free speech issues generally. You asked about the First Amendment implications.
Usually when something like this is issued by the government, they are very careful to run it by lawyers to distinguish speech protected by the First Amendment and to swear up and down that they do not intend to disrupt or harass people engaged in that speech and then draw clear distinction with the types of speech, and we'll discuss those I'm sure in a minute, that are not protected by the First Amendment and where the courts recognize that it's okay for the government to punish and to regulate and to discourage in other ways.
This executive order didn't do that. This executive order swapped things together, as in certain types of restaurant meals where they don't care if the French fries touch the baked beans. That leaves with many readers, including me, the very much the impression that they are intending to use government force against some categories of advocacy that are protected by the First Amendment. If I can rattle on just a bit longer, what does the First Amendment say? It says we have got that Congress shall not infringe on the freedom of speech.
It also has two other clauses. The right of the people peaceably to assemble must not be infringed, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Now, at numbers 2 and 3 here, we don't mention as often as free speech, but they clearly are a gesture toward assembly, what we think of today as demonstrations in many cases, and petition for redress of grievances, which specifically focuses on agitation, as it were, which might not take the form of assemblies, but agitation to get the government to change policy.
This executive order interestingly tracks the complaints of radicalization, whose object can be to change government policy. Right there, you have radicalization in and of itself is usually taken to be protected speech. It may be objectionable, offensive speech, trying to push people into radical positions. From a different perspective, that's just what the First Amendment is all about. The most protected stuff of all is speech intended to get people to change their political positions.
It goes on to say that it's particularly going to take a look at ones that are intended to affect democracy and its outcomes or government policy. Again, in specifying that, they are specifying that they will be looking specifically at going after the kinds of speech that the framers of the First Amendment would have thought as absolutely core, more than artistic speech, more than entertainment, is that political speech of agitation against what is seen as bad government. That is the very core of the First Amendment.
When Speech Crosses The Line: Radicalization & Disruption
Everybody knows that yelling fire in a theater is not necessarily protected, but here we're testing something different. Under the use of “radicalization disruption,” there's a new part of the law here, or an old part of the law, which is the second and third parts of the First Amendment is what's going to be tested. Am I correct with that?
They are going to test the limits of things that the courts have seen as protected and how that will play out as far as whether the courts respond vigorously or whether we see victories in practice that may not reflect actual victories in a court ruling. We've seen that in the cowering and discouragement of speech, sometimes by places that don't want to go through the legal process.
They don't want to face a possible Justice Department investigation with much less prosecution, regulatory consequences, and tax consequences, as I mentioned earlier. All these things could chill speech, whether or not we ever wind up getting a court ruling out of it. It's going to be aimed at some of those things. We have some clues as to some of the rationales and some of the areas they're going to be pushing on.
Those who have taken their First Amendment course in George Mason or other places will remember the list of exceptions, the list of things that are okay for the government to regulate or suppress. That can include obscenity, that includes fraudulent speech, and it can include speech that infringes on someone's copyright.
For these purposes of political advocacy, the ones that come up often are incitement and threatening speech, sometimes stalking, might be also. It's important that we come back and take a look at those because the law is actually pretty well settled on a lot of that. The law doesn't seem to be in the place that the Trump administration thinks it is.
The law narrowly cabins the concept of incitement and not just threat, but “true threat,” which is the special legal term, to prevent the government from suppressing a lot of dangerous things, perhaps that someone should know better than doing, but don't fall into those incitement or threat categories. That is something. Almost immediately, when I discuss these issues, the issues raised by the executive order, although, as I said, very few of them are new. People say, “Isn't that incitement?”
Before I turn over the microphone to Barbara, just a quick follow-up on that. We're recording this on October 1, 2025. Our audience will probably hear this episode in about fourteen days or so. By then, I assume there would be a few lawsuits filed on this executive order. Are we hearing of who is doing what on that matter?
Not necessarily, because with lawsuits, especially these days, you've got to wait for standing. You've got to wait for someone's rights to be trampled on. That may not happen. We didn't come for weeks.
The Legislative Role: Congressional Oversight & Bipartisan Consensus
Got it. Barbara, the microphone is yours. Co-host the Honorable Barbara Comstock.
In your piece, Walter, you rightfully identified a concern the way there might be a going after the tax exemption of charities and foundations that may have given this talk of groups that may have given dollars to organizations or groups that if there's a person that is associated with a group that might've done something, that then they'll go after the groups. When you look at some of the project 2025 goals, goals where they wanted to go after particular 501(c)(3) groups.
They had an earlier executive order this year, back in February, where they wanted to have some of the agencies bring lawsuits against some of these foundations and charities. There a liberal and conservative charities that are out there giving money to organizations, and to use a conservative example, say if there was a conservative organization that gave money to a pro-life group, and a member of that pro-life group happened to go out and blow up an abortion clinic.
There are people on the left and the right who are hostile to many of these good groups that do a lot of things.
As someone who's pro-life, I wouldn't want to see a pro-life group have their tax status taken away or have their individual, any of their individual rights taken away, or necessarily have them investigated. Go and investigate the person who blew up the abortion clinic. Certainly, in the last administration, we had people very concerned about were people in Catholic churches were being investigated wrongfully if they protested about certain policies.
Really, to get this into the concerns of, listen, this is something that can impact both sides. When you talked about the charities and the foundations that may get targeted here, do you think people really appreciate how that is going to impact if that action is taken? There are people on the left and the right who are hostile to many of these good groups that do a lot of things that people on each side have an interest in changing policy and doing good works and helping people change, whether they care about clean water and clean air.
They care about helping women with their pregnancies or whatever the issue is that might have disagreement on maybe a national policy level. These are people at the local level who are helping people. Do we, in these attacks, want to disrupt what many of these good groups are doing, even if you don't agree with their agenda necessarily? People have given their money to these groups. It's been distributed to these groups.
Even if there's a bad apple or two in them, go after them on the criminal level if they do something bad, but don't start attacking these groups themselves. I think you identified that concern, and just wanted you to maybe talk about that and put that in perspective since you've seen the history of that from both sides. I know Cato has been one of the rare groups that's consistent and criticizing this on both sides, when sometimes action is taken to go after one side or the other.
Everything you say, Barbara, I agree with. It's very important that we think carefully before we throw away what has been a longstanding informal peace treaty, and things like trying to go after the tax exemptions of ideologically opposed groups. It's not as if there haven't been murmurs at various points from many directions about, let's go after their tax exemptions. People realized first that society needs an independent sector. It needs a sector that is not under the thumb of directors from Washington about what you can say and what you cannot say.
It benefits when that is a diverse sector. I was so heartened to see Lawson Bader, who is the head of DonorsTrust, one of the leading conservative philanthropy guys in the country, who had a wonderful statement yesterday saying that “It's time for conservative philanthropy people to speak out because if the Open Society Foundation, which is Soros' or if the Ford Foundation can be targeted without really any good evidence, they've broken the law.” I agree with his analysis there. There isn't any good evidence.
Everyone is vulnerable. When the wheel turns, and I often say, “Protect your opponent's rights, because when the wheel turns, you're going to find out that you protected your own rights when you did that.” Thank you, Lawson Bader, for saying that. He says that it's time to calm down. There are a couple of reasons in practice why the attack on nonprofit exemptions is dangerous. One of them is that for many types of legal attack, there's a gradation in which there are small fines.
The more serious the offense determined by some court, the more serious the fines. In the world of nonprofits, you have this death switch to revoke the whole tax exemption because of perhaps misconduct or bad results in one of the thousand things they supported as a huge foundation. That it's called a nuclear penalty or whatever, that gets people into apocalyptic thinking of, ”We support a thousand things for this foundation. They're going to try to cut us all off rather than have some regulatory sanction about go and sin no more on this mistake you made with a group that you should have vetted better before giving them money.”
Again, this is across the board. Any sort of foundation can get caught up in this. Universities, in their own way, also distribute money to a lot of things and sometimes get in trouble in some of those same ways. As Lawson Bader says, “Step back, calm down, realize that we are legislating not just for our opponents, but for ourselves too.” Beyond that, we don't want to, and we've already risked a lot of people remembering the scandal in the Obama administration.
I think it was a scandal, about investigations of conservative groups which were being done in highly burdensome ways, that caused the LaGrasse Roots groups, which just wanted to get together as a constitution study group, to suddenly be hit with 100-page document demands and so forth. It's so easy to abuse. It's such a treasure to have reached a point where there was a bipartisan consensus against that abuse. It's so hard to police that abuse. Let's not open the door for it to come back.
You protect your opponents because when the wheel turns, you'll find you protected your own.
Thank you. I totally agree.
I just wanted to clarify, the earlier executive order was on DEI, and it seems like these same groups that have been targeted on DEI policies that aren't necessarily illegal, just the administration happens to not like them. You may not like that policy, but the next administration could say some groups have a policy on being some of the anti-woke.
Whatever policies they might have that if a new administration says, “I don't like when private sector groups have such and such a policy, and we're going to go after a private sector group because of a policy we don't like.” These same groups that they've been saying they want to go after on DEI have now been switched over to this First Amendment violence.
It seems like it's been switched to, it was that issue. Now we're going to switch the tables. As you rightly pointed out, this is something that we had gained. It's a bipartisan consensus, like let's not start opening the door to go after the private sector communities, because I hadn't seen the donors trust comment. That is important that they come together like that because it is.
There's just great work being done by these groups on both sides of the aisle in its advocacy for the First Amendment issue that we all care about, and having the right to have people contribute to that. I know from being active on getting Supreme Court justices confirmed, there's a lot of donor money that went into 501(c)(3) groups that were involved in that activity. I could see a future liberal organization, very much a future liberal administration, very much wanting to target groups like that.
Legislative Solutions: State Vs. Federal Approaches To Free Speech
I want to talk a little bit about universities in the eye of free speech there. Before we go there, let me just clarify that the words doxing and the words justifying violence are not necessarily defined legally, not on a federal level for sure. Am I correct, Walter?
That is correct.
We are legislating not just for our opponents but for ourselves too.
Barbara, from your experience, both at the state house and at the federal House of Representatives, what is the legislative role here that needs to be taken, especially after we're seeing this come up to the surface? Again, as you both mentioned, this is not just a Republican issue. There was abuse during the Obama administration. Now there's abuse during the Trump administration. Where's the legislative role? Is this a state or a federal issue to be fixed, and how?
I think what would be more helpful, instead of this, is having some congressional oversight on some of this. Whatever issues there might be on this, have some oversight and try to bring some bipartisan consensus here, and realize certainly in the area of violence, which this all came out of, the gun violence, and just a horrible incident, and there've been more.
This also happened in the context of a Catholic church being shot up, as well as the horrible murder of Charlie Kirk. We have a lot of violence out there for a lot of reasons, but when these things happen, unfortunately, people go to their corners and want to blame the other side. Unfortunately, since my daughter has just moved back from Australia, where they don't see these things every day, her children had three years of not having to deal with this.
You would think this would be a good opportunity for some oversight to come up with some answers. Why are we seeing this? How can we work together on this? Let's find some bipartisan consensus. I think you may have been there, David, or maybe it was a little before your time when we had some of these incidents in Virginia, where we did come together on some difficult issues and find what are some bills that we can pass in this area that are bipartisan? One of my great frustrations when I was in Congress was that it was rare.
I did have some legislation that I actually did with Senator Cornyn that we did do on this that was bipartisan wasn't much, but it actually signed by Donald Trump, of all people, but it was on getting the Knicks list updated a bit and trying to track down some of these bad guys who shouldn't have guns in the first place. There needs to be a lot more oversight in this area, and not a rush to go after groups or these conclusions that are implicit in a lot of these executive orders have come before real factual fact-finding missions that should be done by congressional oversight.
Thank you. Walter?
If I could pursue that a little more, because I think there's a really useful point where legislators can get involved. David raised two areas of so-called speech justifying violence, and that one I'm just going to toss to the side because there is no proper government role in regulating speech justifying violence. It has to be some other grounds than the fact that someone saw violence as justified. The second one, doxing, is interesting.
It is not well defined. What we call doxing informally consists of a combination of some speech that is likely protected by the First Amendment, with some other speech that is not. Let me give examples. We all remember after the Dobbs decision when people picketed close to the private homes of Supreme Court justices. There was some worry, and with some good grounds, that the Supreme Court justices could be made personally unsafe as a result of this. Not going to get into all the details, but the Supreme Court, of course, ironically or otherwise, is the very body that shapes the rules consistent with the First Amendment.
Can you prohibit the publication of someone's home address or the assembly for purposes of petition within a block, half a block right in front of their front door? What is permitted assembly? What is permitted petitioning? The court, pursuing principle rather than some self-interest, never wavered and never gave the impression that it was going to be okay if Congress banned the publication of the addresses of Supreme Court justices' home residences because they care more about the principle, even if they are themselves being put at risk by it.
There's a lot that I admire, actually, about the federal court system. One of the institutions that has not failed us in the way that several other institutions have. You get, therefore, this question around doxing, which is if it's legally protected to print someone's address, and if that's true of a Supreme Court justice, I would say it is necessarily true of law enforcement also. It is true of an ICE agent, for example. Where doxing probably does get into a punishable and unprotected zone is when it's combined with something else, such as encouragement of harassment, such as activities that we would recognize as stalking, some of which are not protected by the First Amendment.
You've got that term doxing, which bridges some things that are pretty clearly protected with some things that pretty clearly aren't. I find myself wishing constantly that we have people in power who could draw fine distinctions and say, “We intend to go after the unprotected kind and not the protected kind. Have no worries that we will suppress your speech unless you are organizing harassment or something like that.” We don't.
That's not the administration that we have, but we should be prepared as they turn this into prosecutions to keep those things in mind ourselves. It's an unpopular position for me to say it, but I'm going to say it anyway, which is ICE agents and police in general, with a few possible, very unusual exceptions having to do with undercover projects lasting a while, they do have to expect that they will be under the same magnifying glass that Supreme Court justices and state legislators.
We all know that state legislators have gotten lots of death threats and acts of actual violence, sometimes connected with where they live personally, as in Minnesota. We have all collectively and I think correctly decided that much as our admiration goes out to the state legislators who run these risks and to the many judges who get the death threats that we don't want to sacrifice the First Amendment even in this emergency.
Public Life & Personal Risk: The Magnifying Glass On Officials
As a matter of fact, for state legislators or for any legislator, the first thing we do when we're a candidate for office is to go file a piece of paper that declares where we live. We publish our own.
They have to look it up to make sure that you live in your district. I had people come and protest at my home.
We publish our own addresses.
Many people I know have had demonstrations in front of their homes with ugly language, with terrible language being addressed at them over loudspeakers, and sometimes it’s possible. Lawyers call the time, place, and matter regulation. The bullhorns at 12:00 PM or had been night. No, but part of what comes with the territory in public life is putting up with a lot of things. I do see the point of the ICE agents and the police. I don't see their point in masking, but I do see their point in thinking that there should be a great deal of social stigma in publishing their addresses in many cases.
Nonetheless, I also want some consideration for, let's say, the election administrators. They've gotten thousands of death threats. These are often volunteers, low-paid county employees, or city employees, and they run a gauntlet of death threats just because some people think the election was stolen and harassed them as a result. We all need to step back and not identify just with one camp, but also identify with people who are genuinely being made afraid.
Lawmakers have a unique role in speaking for the public on these very close cases.
That is, I could tell you, because I'm the president of the former Members Association, as well as the worked with the National Council on Election Integrity. One of the things we've seen is this increased violence and threats. It comes from both extremes, thinking that violence is more acceptable, and each side does make excuses for their own side.
An example of the individual, the officer on January 6th who shot the person coming into the Capitol who was breaking the window and about to go right onto the floor of the Capitol. Whenever I show people where Ashli Babbitt was, and as she was about to go in, she had been warned, they'd been warned to stop.
There was a whole investigation of that. He was exonerated, yet his life was put in danger by the many threats against him for that. People often forget that there were people who were part of that whole January 6th group that got trampled by their own people. Nobody ever got as upset about the poor people who got trampled. Of course, 140 police officers who also attacked. Again, one side ignores that group, and then they also want to ignore, as you mentioned, the Minnesota folks who get attacked.
This is a fact of life that has become increasingly more dangerous. Again, that's why we need that oversight in Congress. It's not just that this executive order came out of one incident that the administration was concerned about. These incidents have been rising, and the Capitol itself has been warning that they are overwhelmed by the threats to the members of Congress and the climate that has been really dangerous since January 6th.
Thank you for bringing that back because it gets to the point that I wanted to tie together, which is that when you've got a close case situation like doxing plus possible harassment. It can help a lot for legislators to try to get in and draw reasonable lines. I think of instances like abortion clinic buffer zones and things in which the courts have often deferred, saying, “The legislature tried to balance these rights. It is a close case with rights on both sides.”
They heard lots of testimony and were going to defer to what the legislator thought was the right way of balancing the rights in that instance. I think that doxing, when combined with worse things, is another area where, if lawmakers tried to draft a reasonable set of rules to get into the gray areas and decide which is on which side. Courts might welcome that.
I can tell you that if legislators have not done that, then the way that a lot of judges will approach the thing is to say, “There is no enacted law against this behavior, and so you must not punish the person for doing it.” That's the way that the analysis goes if you haven't banned the thing by law. Lawmakers have a unique role in being able to speak for the public on these very close cases.
Walter, are you talking about both the federal and state levels?
You could do either. I incline to start at the state level just because that's where criminal law originates. If there is felt to be national crisis in the area going wrong, then maybe look at the federal level. I'd start with the state with state legislatures.
To summarize this section, we all agree that there's no room for violence. Everybody's against violence. There shouldn't be just a blanket protection for everybody in law enforcement or everybody, because if it's okay for Supreme Court justices and for legislators' addresses to be published, then we should operate whether it's government or law enforcement in the open, not in secret. However, there should be reasonable exemptions and rules when needed, and that could be at the state level. Did I summarize this correctly?
There's no room for violence. Everybody's against violence, and there shouldn't be a blanket protection for everybody.
Sounds good to me.
Universities As Free Speech Incubators: Viewpoint Diversity & DEI
Thank you. Dear and near to my heart are universities. If we're talking about free speech, we cannot talk about free speech without talking about universities. That's where free speech starts. That's where we teach kids to do so. I am an immigrant who arrived here with a heavy accent at the age of 19 and $2,000 in my pocket and a dream.
George Mason University had created a conservative who went on to serve as the first adult immigrant in Mr. Jefferson's house in history. Free speech to me is important. The role of universities is important. I penned an op-ed in USA Today in late September that argued that eliminating DEI programs in public universities is the wrong approach.
Instead of attacking these institutions, conservatives should engage with them. Let's strengthen universities by widening and promoting viewpoint diversity, including conservatives. Let's get conservative representation, which we all agree there are not enough conservatives in higher ed. I'm one of the few. Barbara is one of the few. There needs to be more conservative representations in faculty and leadership, and curriculum.
Therefore, we should reform or change the AI, but not to retreat it. I don't want to talk about the AI per se, but I'd like to hear both of your thoughts on what the legal is for you, Walter? What are the legal risks for universities restricting speech too broadly, and the lack of conservatism in universities, which is a fact?
A bunch of big questions there. I will start with the risks for universities. One of the points I make when I started out on these higher ed issues is how diverse higher education is. You've got state institutions and you've got private institutions, and the constitutional and legal rules are completely different between the two. You've got religious colleges, a very important sector.
One of the things about religious colleges, and I have to say this is completely trampled by some of the proposals that I see for having the federal government impose some Aussie First Amendment standard on every higher education institution, is that the religious ones are often organized specifically to hold some values true and others false. They are offering an experience, an important part of which consists of validating some views rather than others.
Not all religious colleges, obviously, but some important ones, yes. With that, I step back from the idea that one answer is necessarily going to fit each of those three categories and start with public universities because that's where we are right now. They come under a bunch of additional constitutional requirements that do not apply to Harvard, to Stanford, to the world. That involves certain expectations of political neutrality.
They need to call it a higher standard if you want. The fact is that when they fire a professor or expel a student for ideological reasons, it's possible they violated the Constitution, which is not true when Yale or Princeton does, and so we look at that. One of the things, and I agree, and I didn't want to get into a big DEI sideline, but as someone who has been over my career, very critical of a lot of the practices that got identified with the standards on hiring and student admission and so forth.
I see this bulldozer being brought in, knocking over not only the things, many of the things that I objected to, but also Washington, these days seems to take this view that even being in favor of DEI and spirit is a violation of the law, even if they cannot trace that to anyone's being treated badly. The old idea was that the government was going to mind how you actually treated the professors if you weren't denying someone tenure for an improper reason.
If you weren't denying someone admission as a student for an improper reason, then the fact that you have some woozy atmosphere that differed from the government's policy on this wouldn't get anyone into court because these woozy atmospheres of ours, we like the ideals and so forth, are another of the things that the First Amendment is there to protect. Even at public universities, there's a rule for the First Amendment in protection of people's right to endorse as ideas things that may not currently be part of the law, things that may have been rejected by the Supreme Court.
It's still okay to get up on a podium and say, “I wish the Supreme Court hadn't ruled that way in the Harvard admission case. I wish we could go back to and maybe overturn that decision.” That's very often First Amendment-protected speech. Yet the education authorities and the Department of Justice in Washington often act as if you cannot even talk the talk, regardless of whether you take any action.
Protecting Programs: Beyond Race-Neutral Criteria
Barbara, from your leadership program on promoting open discourse, give me some reflections on your thoughts on this, especially as it comes. You've helped young women train them on our system and open and free speech. Where are you on this?
I think, regardless of how you feel about DEI, it's not illegal to have programs that help particular groups. It's been going on forever. There was an example in the University of Virginia where, let's give you the details here, is the Commerce Cohort Program, which provided mentorship to first-year students based on need, not race. The current Justice Department is claiming the program was discriminatory because most of the participants who signed up were non-White.
Even though the program's criteria were race-neutral and the UVA's freshman class happened to be majority non-White, they were going to claim that this was some DEI program. This absurd logic now it's outcomes. They don't even say it wasn't even a racial program. I know with my program, we would reach out to all kinds of people because we knew the type of program. I founded my program because I knew when I was a young student, like in high school, because it's for high school girls, junior high. I was often working in the summer to save up money for college.
My parents were a teacher and a salesperson, and I didn't see a lot of those opportunities. Someone came to me. We try and reach out to people who aren't the automatic kids who hear about these types of programs. We don't have a formal way of reaching out, but we would reach out to make sure we were getting a diverse group of girls who were coming. Actually, it's open.
We've had some boys who got into it, too, to a diverse group of students and young women, because we wanted to make sure kids who didn't have those opportunities, who didn't know about those types of opportunities, would have that opportunity to hear from women leaders in our community.
That was the purpose of it is to just spread that type of opportunity to a more economically diverse group. People who just didn't have that type of exposure because the whole concept was just to see people in their place of work and see them leading and have them tell you how they lead, and then get to ask them questions when you're a freshman and a sophomore in high school. What is it like to head up the legal department at Northrop Grumman or head up whatever department in a hospital or in a tech company?
They met with Sheila Johnson, and she told them how she had faced discrimination as a young girl, how her father, who was a doctor, couldn't work in all the hospitals where others were able to work. This was just a great program like that. I never thought of it as a DEI program, but when I listen to some people who attack programs, I realized I hadn't had that type of exposure, and I had a pretty normal middle-class upbringing.
I just wanted to have as many people and as many diverse people in our community is incredibly diverse, so be able to come in and have that same type of exposure that, say, maybe a prep school kid whose dad knows everybody. They meet those people, the cocktail parties that their parents have, but I hadn't met those people growing up, and I them now able to actually walk into these companies and see if they can imagine being that person when they grow up.
I remember on several occasions, Barbara, when you and I were on the campaign trails, walking around, people would stop you and say, “My daughter went to your program.” They are average constituents who never didn't knew you, didn't know me in person, didn't have “the connections,” but their daughters were in that program and they truly felt the value of that program.
I made them chiefs of staff for others. I think we were down at the house of delegates together, and somebody came up after we were talking to a group of delegates, and they said, “I was in your program. I'm now the chief of staff to Senator.”
That is great. We're getting towards the end of this episode, and I would love to spend another hour talking about these issues with both of you. Perhaps we can schedule another episode in a few months and keep in mind this thought. I got an email from a Dean, I'll keep the person unnamed, of a big school in a big Virginia university, and said, “I loved your piece in the USA Today. Tell me how we differentiate between a conservative person and conservative ideology, and what's legal for me now if I want to hire a conservative to ask, or what are the questions?” That'll probably be a whole episode that we can spend on that. Keep that as food for thought for now, and let me close with what comes next?
The Enduring Strength Of The First Amendment
I think the DonorsTrust in that the conservative DonorsTrust is seeing this too, I think, probably bringing together some of those folks, that's exciting. I think we've seen that with some of the action the FCC took, that you got more people, not just some of those who are being attacked, but you had people saying, “I don't even like this, but it's freedom of speech. I think the fact that folks like the DonorsTrust are stepping up.
Maybe we're getting back to that, or the beginning, a glimmer of this needs to be bipartisan. I really want to credit Walter and Cato for having been there when it was on the other side of the aisle and consistently being one of those to identify it in somebody who has that long history and can remind us we've been here before and we need to get back to that bipartisan history.
Indeed. Walter, final words are for you, sir, to close this episode with your thoughts, including what gives us hope today for the resilience of our First Amendment.
The First Amendment has been a pretty amazing thing. It is stronger in what it protects in the United States than elsewhere. Like so many of our legal rights, it's emerged from a history of abuse in which presidents and others did bad things. People united in defense of Eugene V. Debs languishing in jail because he was an anti-war socialist. This built an inheritance of rights that I don't think Americans want to throw away. We are slow to anger. We are slow to counter-mobilize. Yet I think that public opinion is out there and is gradually mobilizing on the right side of this. I don't think public opinion can be ignored.
Thank you. I've been saying for a while now, again, drawing on my immigration experience and story and the fortunes of my family on this greatest shining city on the hill, that every day is a great day in this great nation, even the bad days. We have had a lot of bad days, but every day is a great day in this great nation. God bless this nation.
Thank you. Sure, we all still use our public voices and that they not be silenced and that people, whether it's at universities or at our think tanks, which are obviously some of those groups that might get targeted in the day. We want to see those voices be vibrant and fearless in speaking up for those rights our founders gave us.
Thank you. This was a fascinating discussion with our guest, Walter Olson, senior fellow of the Cato Institute and one of the nation's leading voices on constitutional law, civil liberties, and free expression. The Honorable Barbara Comstock, my dear friend, former member of the House of Delegates, and former congresswoman from Virginia. Thank you, and looking forward to seeing you on another episode.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Walter Olson on LinkedIn
- Barbara Comstock on LinkedIn
- Barbara Comstock Program for Women in Leadership
- Cato Institute
- Lawson Bader on LinkedIn
- DonorsTrust
About Barbara Comstock
Barbara Comstock was a Member of Congress (2015-2019), a Member of the Virginia General Assembly (2010-15), served as Director of Public Affairs at the Justice Department, and as Chief Counsel on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee.
Barbara was named one of the "Top Ten Most Effective Lawmakers" in the 115th Congress by the Center for Effective Lawmaking and has been a fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics, UVA’s Center for Politics, and the American University Sine Institute.
Barbara serves as an ABC News political contributor, and appears regularly on CNN, PBS, and MSNBC. She serves as the President of the Former Members of Congress Association, and as a Member of the Board of Trustar Bank, the Society for the Rule of Law, and UVA’s Miller Center for the Study of the Presidency. She is a mother of 3 and grandmother of 7 and lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband, Chip, a lifelong educator.
About Walter Olson
Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and is known for his writing on law, public policy, and regulation.
His first book, The Litigation Explosion, was one of the most widely discussed general‐audience books on law of its time. It led the Washington Post to dub him an “intellectual guru of tort reform.” His books since have stirred discussion on topics ranging from workplace law to mass litigation to the state of law schools.
He is known as founder and principal writer of the longest-running blog on law, Overlawyered, which ran from 1999 to 2020. He has advised many public officials from town councils to the White House and is active in civic affairs in his home state of Maryland, having been named by Gov. Larry Hogan as co‐chair of commissions aimed at ending the practice of gerrymandering. He is often interviewed for his expertise on elections and redistricting law.
Before joining Cato, Olson was associated with the Manhattan Institute and American Enterprise Institute and was an editor at the magazine Regulation, then edited by Antonin Scalia. Olson’s more than 400 broadcast appearances include most leading media outlets, the BBC, and Oprah.