What Sharon McMahon Would Have Said At UVU Commencement Before Charlie Kirk Cancellation

0:00Hello again from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center here in New York City. I am Carlo Versano, and this is another edition of The 1600. This country was stone cold dead. Welcome back, everybody. We got a great guest today, a timely guest, and I want to get right to her. Sharon McMahon is a bestselling author, a civics educator. She has been coined America's government teacher. My old job. No, I'm just kidding. She was scheduled to deliver the commencement address at Utah Valley University this week. UVU, of course, is the campus where Charlie Kirk was assassinated at the beginning of the school year.

0:35Sharon has since been uninvited, canceled, you might say, from delivering that address due to comments that she made in the wake of that assassination. We'll get into all of that. But without further ado, let me welcome Sharon McMahon to the show. Sharon, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. So you write the preamble over on Substack. I want to get to some of your writings on civics. But let's sort of talk about the timeliness of why we brought you on today. In your words, can you just sort of describe the events that led to both your invitation to deliver the commencement at UVU and then why that invitation was rescinded?

1:11Yeah, I've spoken at UVU multiple times and each time to pretty significant success. They have a large basketball arena that was, you know, over 8000 seats that was pretty full both times that I was there. The administration of the school, including the school president, has personally heard me speak and wanted to extend an invitation to who they perceived would be a popular speaker to sort of round out or end off a really challenging school year. The school community has been through a lot. So once they extended the invitation to me, I was very honored. I certainly didn't expect it. And not long after they announced me formally as the commencement speaker, there began an organized, coercive pressure campaign on the part of government officials, both congressional officials and state-level officials, along with Turning Point USA, to try and pressure the school into removing me as the speaker.

2:18And as a result of this pressure campaign, then there became a pretty significant security issue, not just with me, not just threats against me, but threats against the school, threats against the school's president, the board of trustees, the school's administration. And it just became, you know, an untenable situation, especially for a school who had been through so much and who understandably was hesitant to take a risk. Do you get the sense that the security situation, was that the fig leaf or were there direct threats against your life? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. No, there definitely were security threats against all of those people.

3:02Very real ones. People saying like, let her get up on the stage and we'll just take her out that way. I'm paraphrasing people with a countdown to the number of days I could be Kirkified, they said. And again, very significant issues that were sent privately as well. Those are just a few of the public examples. But the security issues were never there the other two times that I spoke at this school. They only began after this coordinated pressure campaign began. Sure. So if you're not sort of like familiar with the background here and Sharon, feel free to jump in if it feels like I'm misrepresenting things.

3:42So my understanding is on the day of the shooting itself of Mr. Kirk back on September 10th, you posted on Facebook something very anodyne. I have it right here. You wrote, this isn't the kind of America I want to live in. I'm sure Charlie Kirk and I would not agree on many things and my heart is still broken for his family. end quote. That's exactly how I felt. I think exactly how most Americans sort of felt in that moment. Then two days later, there was a series of quotes that you posted on Instagram from Charlie's sort of like writings or public comments. That appears to be the thing that sort of got this pressure campaign working.

4:20Can you speak to a little bit about that specific post? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things I discovered that actually was a little bit surprising to me after his horrific assassination was the number of people who had simply never heard of Charlie Kirk. That was surprising to me. I thought he was much more of a household name than perhaps he actually was. So there were a large number, thousands of people who were reaching out to me saying, I just don't understand what is going on here. Why would somebody want to assassinate somebody that they had never heard of? So they really could not make sense of exactly what the issue was.

5:00Why was this man I've never heard of so hated? So that was one sort of group of people. And then another group of people were people who were huge fans of Charlie Kirk, who were saying to me, I don't understand why all of these other people are happy that he's dead. Charlie Kirk was a wonderful man. You know, like in their mind, he embodied so many things that they wished to emulate. So both of these groups of people were who I was trying to educate in this post. There are a couple of slides that talk about giving background to who he was. He started this organization. He had this huge podcast, a number of chapters, you know, that sort of background info.

5:44And then a number of other slides attempt to contextualize for the people who were huge Charlie Kirk fans who had no idea that there were thousands, perhaps millions of people who were, you know, very against what he believed in, who couldn't understand why people would be offended by some of the things that he said. So the post was doing both of those things. It was addressing the people who had never heard of him. Like, why is this man a big deal? And it was addressing the people who were huge fans who could not understand why people took issue with some of his comments. So that's the gist. Yeah, that's the gist of what I put on Instagram.

6:27Hey, guys, sorry for the interruption. Just going to take a quick ad break here and we'll be right back. So if you were I mean, so when people are listening to this, it'll be Wednesday, which should be the day of the commencement at UVU. So, Sharon, I know you're a writer by trade, so I think it's probably a safe assumption that you put a fair amount of work into the commencement address that you were going to give tonight. If you were going to deliver that address, I don't want you to, you don't have to, like, read the speech to me. But I'm just curious, what were you planning on telling these students?

6:57The speech, of course, was a work in progress, like most public speakers, especially with a high-stakes public speech. Always to the last minute. Always to the last minute. And I am the same way. I am replaying things in my mind. I'm rehearsing it in my mind. I will wake up in the middle of the night picturing myself giving the speech and there will be tweaks that I make. But I'll tell you that the gist is this. The framework that I was working with was things that I used to believe about America that I know are no longer true. And just as by way of example, one of the things that I used to believe is that people who have come before us who created a significant amount of change in the country, I'm thinking about, for example, people involved in the civil rights movement, that they felt at the time that what they were doing was really, that they had a high probability of success.

7:50that if they just kept going, that if they just kept knocking on the door, that if they just kept organizing, trying harder, that they would soon find, would soon see the success of their labors. When in reality, over and over and over again, we see that people kept going when they had no assurance of their success. And the reason I think this is relevant to students today is because in the age of instant gratification, and I can have McDonald's delivered to my door in 10 minutes if I want to, it seems very easy to be discouraged by how difficult and long change is. That, you know, well, I made the calls.

8:30I called my senator. I posted on Instagram. I donated to the thing. Nothing happened. Right. It's very easy to feel like nothing happened when in reality, almost everyone from history you might admire had no assurance of their success and they kept going anyway. Right. That's no, I mean, it's I have a four year old, so she's not quite in college yet. But my wife and I were just talking about like, how do we how do we sort of teach her this idea of like resilience? Right. That things aren't going to always go your way. Obviously, it's very hard with a toddler. Right. They don't understand that at all.

9:09But even, you know, even older, older children, like I see some and I just think about like exactly what you said, which is that there is no assurance in life. All you can really do is work hard. But we are now in this sort of like weird, you know, media, media and political moment where it just sort of feels like the game is rigged kind of. Right. Like it doesn't really is that sort of what you were trying to get at in this speech a little bit? Well, absolutely young people think the game is rigged. Overwhelmingly, Gen Z believes the game is rigged, that there's an increasing lack of faith in democracy.

9:48There's an increasing distrust of institutions. And I know that, you know, as a member of the press, you I'm sure that has to be of grave concern to you, that a lack of faith in a free press, a lack of faith in these democratic institutions that have upheld this experiment for for 250 years, that that's concerning to anybody who works in this space. So I do think that's part of it. And this institutional aspect is part of it. But so too is the personal aspect of it. That if we feel like, well, I tried, I tried to do it and nothing happened, it's easy to fall into a sense of nihilistic cynicism.

10:32Nothing I do matters. Yeah, burn it down. Nothing matters. It's all controlled by a couple of billionaires with weirdly shaped rocket ships. And nobody, they're just going to buy up all the media outlets. None of it matters. And I think that that's a very dangerous direction to be steering the ship. People who've come before us have had odds that would rival ours in just slightly different contexts. And they kept going despite their lack of assurance. And without the tools that we take for granted now, whether that's being able to speak freely on the Internet or anything, it's a great reminder.

11:11Sure. You know, so not to not to dwell on the Kirk stuff, but, you know, I'm having you on in the wake of this. Thankfully, this time, this this foiled act of political violence that took place over the weekend, which which I was I was at. I you know, this was an event that was meant to your point to celebrate the First Amendment and some of the things that make this country great, including free speech. You know, I again, going back to what you were just saying, like I was looking at some of the Instagram comments on my own work from this weekend. And it's just, you know, this was staged. This was, you know, this was fake or, you know, I wish they got you.

11:45You know, I wish it's too bad all the journalists didn't die. My point is not to, like, say, oh, woe is me. But the temperature is so hot. Right. The temperature out there is so hot. But how does one balance free speech and the First Amendment and all the protections that it gives us with a sort of responsibility at the individual level to lower that temperature? If our public officials are not particularly good at that. So it really comes down to us. It's a great question. And I think one of the things that's important to remember is that when we're asking people to take responsibility for their words, take responsibility for the actions that may come about because of their words, that's not an attempt necessarily to silence people.

12:33That there is a balance, a long 250-year jurisprudence, a balance between individual rights and individual responsibilities. So there is a difference between having the freedom to engage in investigative journalism, for example, and being irresponsible with that pen. Like those are not ideas that are actually mutually exclusive. You can have both of those things at the same time. So, you know, where I have concerns about the Internet, where I have concerns about free speech on the Internet is when it comes down to people like, for example, in my situation, government officials inciting acts of violence with their with their with their words that they have a responsibility to their constituents and to the public to be careful with.

13:27It's not that they don't have free speech. It's not that they are not allowed to say, I don't approve of her as a choice for speaker. Or I don't approve of the actions in the case of the White House Correspondence Center. You would be free as a member of the press to say, I don't agree with the president on these issues. Here's why. I think the president is doing a bad job on the following things. Totally. You should be free to say that. But there is a difference between that and in my situation, wielding the power of the government to silence a private citizen, and perhaps in the White House Correspondents Dinner, a temperature that has grown to an extent where it is encouraging people to engage in violence.

14:09There is a way to express, to use your rights. There's a way to use your rights that does not encourage people to commit acts of terrorism or acts of assassination. And I think we have, there are some actors that are abusing that freedom. Well, no, no question about that. I mean, before we move on, I want to talk about your book, but let's take the other side of that argument. I think if there's somebody listening who might say to themselves right now, look, freedom of speech, to her point, to Sharon's point, it doesn't mean freedom of consequences, right? And this woman made comments that many people took as offensive in the immediate aftermath of a horrific act of political violence, and she's suffering the consequences of that speech by being disinvited from this commencement.

14:54What would you say to that? If this was, I totally hear that as a piece of criticism. If this was, say, and I do a lot of public speaking, this is a private company and they say, you know what, last minute reconsideration, you're just not right for our organization. It would be absolutely well within their rights to do that. If this was, say, a private university and their board of regents gets together and says, this is not the right fit for our organization, that's where the chips fall. Then that's how it is. You would hear probably not a peep from me. Tough nuggies, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's just how it goes.

15:30The real difference here is not that some people were mad. That's not what the issue is. In fact, there was no outcry really from the student body. It's not that some people on the Internet were mad about it. It is the actual government officials saying overtly in plain language on the Internet that they were going to withhold state funding from the university should they host me. That's the big difference here. This is not about disfavored speech on the part of, well, a private organization doesn't like being next to that individual. It is about using the levers of government power to force a government institution to silence the speech of a private individual.

16:17That's really the big difference here is the government actors. No, I'm glad you made that point because that's the point that I was hoping you would make because it's very material to our discussion here. I'm sure you've seen this, but to your point, you have a lot of fans in Utah. There's been a billboard campaign I've seen that's gone up around the school in your defense. So there's certainly many people, whether it's in that community or at that university, that we're looking forward to hearing what you said. That's right. Yeah, hopefully. I think there's like 15. I think they paid for 15 billboards, which is really that's kind of it's it's.

16:57It must make you feel good. It's very flattering. It's also slightly slightly bananas. And I mean that in a very in a very kind way. It's always weird to see your face on a billboard. Yeah. Even if it's a good one. Yes, absolutely. Well, this is Sharon. You wrote a book called The Small and the Mighty, a New York Times bestseller a couple years ago. The book argues, you know, that there's a lot of remarkable Americans, which was what you were just sort of saying, who you don't hear about, who are sort of ordinary people who have never made the textbooks, you know, not presidents, but school teachers, telephone operators.

17:32And you have a new book coming out. This is a children's book called We Are Mighty, which is being released on May 16th. Talk a little bit about the children's book. And I have a sort of a question about the through line of these two books. Yeah, the book, the children's book, thank you for asking, is really aimed at helping children see that heroes from history are not just people on Mount Rushmore or people who lived in the White House. And they're not just the people who are Taylor Swift and have, you know, they're not just the pop stars and the billionaires. And that this is not just the way that these people have impacted their communities is not something unattainable for each one of us.

18:13But there is this sort of through line in all of my work that people who I admire from history kept doing the next needed thing. And that is something that's available to every single one of us. It's available to our kindergartners. They can understand what the next needed thing is, especially if we give them instruction on how to figure out what that is. 90-year-olds can do the next needed thing. You don't need to have a lot of money or fame or a million followers on social media. That's something that's available to all of us. And that's really what has kept almost every figure from history that you admire going is the next needed thing.

18:54Well, I mean, I love this idea of, you know, sort of profiling, you know, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. You know, the cynic in me wants to ask you, you know, we're living in this era where power is increasingly concentrated, right? You mentioned the sort of the pro-oligarchs, these tech oligarchs that kind of like run the media now and at least part of our politics. Obviously, we see it within with the executive branch of the federal government. Is your art, is it still credible? You have this argument that, you know, there are still ordinary people who can change history? I mean, I love it when people ask me that question, because it's something that everybody is thinking about.

19:31Like, it just seems like it's just sure. You're like, sure, Sharon. You know, the idea that, like, it's just it's nice to think about. But what I'd encourage you to think about is that from the position of, say, somebody whose parents had been enslaved, the idea that they could change the course of history, that they could access the levers of power, that they could even access literacy, was something that seemed out of reach. Even no matter how hard they grasped, they could never escape Jim Crow. No matter how hard they worked, they could never escape the confines of, you know, a sharecropping system.

20:17So the idea that, you know, power is concentrated in the hands of a few people is not a new idea in America. It has morphed into a new form, but that's not a new idea. The idea that there are a handful of people at the top who want to make sure that the people at the bottom are controlled and that we control them economically, politically, we control access to their information. That is not a new idea in America. People and slavers used to give people copies of the slave Bible that removed the promise of liberation from a Messiah and only included the passages about, you know, obeying your master.

21:02So these concepts have morphed and changed over time. The players have changed, but they have always been present in America. And I would make the argument that some of the greatest proponents of American democracy, people who have done more to uphold democracy in this country, have been people who have been dealt some of the worst hands. They have been people who have been marginalized either because of their race, their gender, their religion. They've been dealt some of the worst hands in America, and they have made some of the most impactful changes. And I just feel like, listen, if they can do it, if they were born into a society that told them they were not allowed to ride on the same streetcar or access the same water fountain, that they were not allowed to have access to education, that they were not allowed to even look a white person in the eye as they walked down the street.

22:06And if the people who came before us believed in democracy, then we can too. We can get off of our cynical high horse. And I'm not saying you are on a cynical high horse, but there are probably some people. There are probably some people. Absolutely am. Yeah. I feel you. I get where you're coming from. We can. If anybody had a right to cynicism, it was the people whose immediate ancestors had been enslaved in the United States. If anyone had a right to cynicism and if anyone had the least amount of cynicism, it was them. And so I feel like, listen, we who have every advantage given to us, who have access to literacy, access to education, the entirety of human knowledge in a small device we hold in our pocket.

22:55If we are given every advantage, then cynicism is not the morally superior position. The people who have come before us, if they had, if they set aside the right to be cynical and continued acting as though what they would do would matter, even though they had no assurance of their success, then we can continue to do the same. That we are not going to make positive change in this country from a place of diehard cynicism that is not the fertile soil in which good things grow. That if we want positive change, we have to believe that it is possible because we are never going to work for that change if we think that it can never happen.

23:36So I hear what you're saying. I get where it's coming from. I'm not even saying, oh, you're wrong to feel that way. I'm not even asking for you to experience feelings of hope in which you wake up in the morning and the sky is blue and the birds are chirping and like everything's looking up. That is not how people who have come before us experienced America. That is not how they experienced America. And they chose to act as though what they would do would matter. And that's available to each one of us even still. Sharon, I want to hire you to be my one-woman hype wall. Get me out of my cynicism working in the news business too long.

24:19Yeah, I feel that. I was researching some of your old work, and I got this great quote I wanted just to read back to you. Quote, this is quoting you, if you could wave a magic wand and affect one significant policy change, you said it would be to, quote, get money out of politics. I read that and it struck me because this is one of the things we've been talking about on the show. We just had on last week Dylan Radigan, who was a MSNBC, CNBC host back in the day. And he famously had this rant that went viral and he actually quit his job afterwards. And he was making this exact point that, you know, money is the root of all evil in politics.

24:57And we cannot even come close to solving some of our problems until we get the dark money out. And until we create a better representational system where politicians just aren't bought by corporations and donors. I mean, it's great to hear that you believe this. I certainly do. What's like one little thing that people can do? Because this is a big, you know, it's not really a feasible thing, or at least it's not feasible in any sort of like short time frame that we all want it to be. But what would you do if you could if you could wave that magic wand and, you know, get money out of politics? What would be the one way to do it?

25:36Yeah. I mean, the first thing that we, one small thing that we could do to make a move down that road would be to federally outlaw gerrymandering. That is something that we absolutely could do. And that doesn't require changing the Constitution. That doesn't require rewriting the First Amendment, which the Supreme Court currently believes money and politics and the First Amendment is all intertwined. intertwined. If we eliminate gerrymandering, that is one big step down the road. 80 % of Americans at the last survey that I read do not feel well represented by government. They do not feel as though whoever's in Congress is good for them.

26:22People might like their individual representative, but they don't like Congress as a whole. I mean, I want to say last week, Congress's approval rating was like 20%. Yeah, that would be high. It's usually less. Insane, like an insanely bad approval rating. Nobody thinks they're doing a good job. And what we are doing now is creating a system in which every two years, we are going to completely re-gerrymander a number of states, or at least attempt to. And it's going to continue to help people feel like they're valid in believing that they're never well represented and that companies are just controlling everything and that, you know, they're billionaires who want to have Florida redraw their maps this week so they can get four more congressional seats.

27:12That, you know, even if those perceptions are not accurate, even if there is not a secret billionaire behind Florida's effort to gain four Republican seats, people's perception is that there is. And I can tell you that no other democracies in the world, especially not democracies that are healthier than ours, they do not allow this kind of influence in their election system. The founders had no concept that this would be the future. They had no concept that 250 years later, that companies would be able to secretly give billions of dollars to control elections, I think they would be horrified. They would be horrified that this is what we have allowed ourselves to become.

28:01So there are many steps that I can think of that would incrementally improve the system, incremental improvement. But gerrymandering is one of them. Another small step towards improving the election system in the United States is having a national primary day. Now, does that have, you know, an immediate effect of like, and now money is out of politics? No. But every single step that we take towards improving America's electoral system is one step closer to being able to create the bigger title or the bigger sea change of potentially amending the Constitution to eliminate money and especially dark money from politics.