How Foreign Governments Police U.S. Speech

Today's guest is Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.

She explains how governments in places like China and the United Arab Emirates restrict academic freedom and expression not just in their own countries but also at colleges and universities in America by exploiting speech codes and threatening to end lucrative satellite campus arrangements.

McLaughlin and Gillespie also talk about whether it was a good idea for American comedians to censor their material at Saudi Arabia's Riyadh Comedy Festival and what to make of President Donald Trump's repeated minimization of the murder of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives.

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0:00—Introduction
1:14—Trump's response to Khashoggi's murder
7:26—The Riyadh Comedy Festival
11:29—Foreign influence on U.S. college campuses
23:55—The NBA and the Chinese government
28:39—Sensitivity exploitation
34:36—Changes to campus culture
39:46—Satellite campuses
43:50—Matthew Hedges and the UAE
50:03—McLaughlin's path to FIRE
51:55—Solutions to campus censorship
58:12—Climate of free speech under Trump

Producer: Paul Alexander
Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
Illustration: Eddie Marshall