A 14-year-old girl's body was found in a ditch near a train track in her hometown of Wiesbaden, Germany. Susanna Maria Feldman was a member of the Jewish community and was a loving daughter.
00:00:49.000By then, Ali Bashar, the 20-year-old man who had raped and strangled Susanna, fled Germany, along with his parents and five siblings, all using fake names.
00:08:24.360Well, what they would say is they're just following the rule of law.
00:08:29.320But that doesn't make any sense because federal prosecutors decide what to charge and what not to charge every day in federal court across the country.
00:08:38.940There are many times people break federal law and prosecutors never charge it.
00:08:45.460Well, you know, the U.S. Congress does not value your liberty or anyone else in this country because what most Americans don't know is that the Congress has found that there are 5,000 federal criminal laws, 5,000 things that are so serious that the Congress thinks that you could potentially go to jail or prison for.
00:09:06.540So, first of all, is Matthew, is he back in prison yet?
00:09:16.320He is in county jail in Kentucky awaiting transfer to another prison.
00:09:21.320But we are hopeful that the president, President Trump, will grant him clemency and return him back home to the community that desperately wants him back.
00:09:32.100I read an article about his going away party, and he was so gracious.
00:09:55.160Matthew kind of left the bitter, angry guy behind in prison many, many years ago.
00:09:59.460So, he has been, you know, he's sad and devastated because he finally got his life back on track only to have it all ripped away from him.
00:10:08.720But I tell you, he is also a very humble man, and he has been just overwhelmed with the number of people who, you know, his change.org petition is close to 100,000 signatures.
00:10:21.200We did a lot of interviews last week, including NBC Nightly News, and he's just been overwhelmed at the number of people from all political stripes who are supporting him and his quest for clemency.
00:10:34.080By the way, that petition is posted at glenbeck.com if you want to go sign it.
00:10:40.220Well, the goal is to just get enough public support that the president decides this is worth doing.
00:10:49.720And the White House is aware of Matthew's case.
00:10:52.020I have yet to run into anyone who thinks that it was a smart or wise idea to send him back to prison for 10 years.
00:11:01.500So, I'm hopeful that something will happen and that the president will sign a clemency petition and Matthew can go back home to his girlfriend and his church community.
00:11:11.680In a theoretical world, right, if we had an Elysium or The Matrix where we could test these things, and you had criminals who did bad things, and you could somehow test the fact that maybe they could return and you could prove it, you could release people all the time.
00:11:30.720The issue is, of course, that would be incredibly risky to release them into the actual population if you weren't sure.
00:11:37.220Here's a case in which we essentially got the opportunity to test.
00:11:40.700We were able to release this guy to see if he could blend into community, to see if his life had been turned around.
00:12:01.120There are thousands of Matthew Charleses in federal prison that just haven't had the opportunity he has to get out.
00:12:08.220The great irony about the American criminal justice system is, one, we think that we are the land of the free, but on the other hand, America incarcerates its citizens at a greater rate than almost any other country on the planet.
00:12:23.120And, two, the great irony of it is, the longer someone spends in corrections, the less likely they generally are to come out and live law-abiding, successful lives.
00:12:35.400And you don't – I can't imagine going to prison for 20 years, 21 years here, and being able to even function on the outside.
00:12:46.360It was a different world that he lived in in the 1990s, completely different.
00:12:52.560When I was released in 2008, I had never been on the Internet, never seen an iPad, an iPhone, or an iPod.
00:13:00.160One of the things I quickly realized when I went to pick up the paper and look at the classified ad section for jobs was no one advertises jobs in the classified section.
00:13:10.560And Matthew had to overcome all those hurdles, too, just the stress of so much change when you've been incarcerated that long.
00:13:18.520And yet he was able to overcome all of that and show that he's a change person, which just – you know, in a perfect world, the Department of Justice would have recognized his rehabilitation and just cut him loose.
00:13:33.340Sean, do you have time to stay with us for a little bit longer?
00:13:47.380You can go to glennbeck.com and sign the petition and get the president's attention, and we've got to correct this.
00:13:57.080There's something good happening in America right now, and that is we're starting to come together on one thing, and that is prison reform.
00:15:40.74012 years and three months in federal prison and got to prison and learned the law and had two briefs that I prepared for other guys and friends of mine in prison that were granted by the United States Supreme Court.
00:15:56.100And I started winning cases in federal court all over, even though I had never been to law school and hadn't even taken freshman English or, and then didn't have an undergraduate degree either.
00:16:12.660This is exactly what happened in Suits.
00:16:14.920Oh my gosh, I can't believe that's happened.
00:16:16.700So you get a Gates Foundation scholarship when you leave and you go to the University of Washington and now you're a professor at George Washington Law?
00:16:32.480I went to the University of Washington up in Seattle School of Law.
00:16:36.180My first job out of law school was clerking for Judge Janice Rogers Brown, a very conservative judge on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
00:16:49.300And then I came to Georgetown as a teaching fellow for two years, and I went on the market to be a law professor, and Georgetown kept me.
00:16:58.380I have just the most amazing job where I get to help people every day.
00:17:01.980So, Sean, the odds that if the president doesn't act that Matthew's going to get out of prison?
00:17:13.020Well, he'll get out, but he'll have to do nine or ten years.
00:17:16.560But I'm trying not to think about that because I really think the president who, you know, I was in the White House about a month ago
00:17:25.180when the president talked about the need to reform our prisons and that it doesn't serve anyone well for people to go to prison and come out worse off.
00:28:58.120Because I now believe that these people who are building the cry closets and crying inside the cry closets, it will become so universal that cry closets will just be the thing.
00:29:12.400It's like we've talked about, like, with, you know, global warming before.
00:29:15.460You can come out and you can say, well, global, you know, forget that a global warming is real or not.
00:29:20.320Talk about the idea that, you know, they're encouraging you to do things that absolutely with all certainty, even if you believe every piece of nonsense that Al Gore has ever said will not solve the problem.
00:29:32.580You know, doing things like, well, you know, you need to unplug your appliances and, you know, all these little steps that will make a quote unquote difference when they know, you know, it's just about selling the idea, right?
00:29:46.460It's not about actually making a difference.
00:29:47.880You can't scientifically make a difference with any of those, you know, causes.
00:29:51.140So, I used to think, well, eventually, like, people will realize that, sure, we want to be clean, but, you know, this is stupid.
00:30:00.320And the reality of the situation, the reality of fossil fuels being incredibly useful to build, I don't know, a civilization on, at some point, people just get older and realize this.
00:30:12.480There's soul on it when they're dopey kids and they eventually realize it later on in life.
00:30:17.060I no longer believe that's accurate at all.
00:30:19.340I now believe that those nonsensical ideas that are fed to teenagers just become the truth later on.
00:30:27.740Not that they're actually true, but that just, it's so widely believed and never challenged that they just adopt that as the entire civilization's policy.
00:31:06.060And then, when that society had enough reason in it, it started going, wait a minute, I shouldn't have somebody else telling me what to do.
00:31:18.860So, it is quickly becoming self-evident that the dinosaurs that believe in cry rooms being funny or cry rooms being tragically sad because it makes you into a four-year-old that will never be prepared for life, that is going to be self-evident that we are wrong and the cry room is right.
00:31:59.260And there was a, right, chromosomes, right?
00:32:01.000Like, and you'd think that eventually the chromosome thing works, it plays out and people understand that that's what it is despite the crazy things that people would say.
00:32:08.820And what happens now is it just keeps moving down that road and for a while, I mean, if you go back 20 years, you'll see comedians like crazy making fun of concepts like this.
00:32:18.760They would mock them, the idea that there were 100 genders.
00:33:11.600I just cannot seem to give birth to this thing.
00:33:14.220So, I saw a local letter to the editor.
00:33:19.940It said, something different is happening.
00:33:22.260I was recently told by a friend that our local paper is a conservative paper and I felt once in a while letters to the editor were written by conservative thinkers.
00:33:31.980I'm not sure if there is a change in the paper's role or if thinkers on the other side are stepping up to the plate.
00:33:37.660But both political parties seem so lost to their elected purpose of working for the people.
00:33:42.360They're overly focused on getting reelected and not going against their big money supporters.
00:33:46.860Last Sunday, I was watching Glenn Beck interviewed on CNN's Reliable Sources and, to my surprise, he held my attention when he spoke of Martin Luther King's call for reconciliation.
00:33:57.120He said, both sides are just trying to win.
00:34:03.200This person writes in, if we're going to continue to have a viable two-party system, we have to know what each party stands for and what they believe.
00:34:14.560And in my mind, Beck makes some very important points.
00:34:17.960I'm now reading two books about conservatives written by conservatives.
00:34:23.720To get our country back, intended by our founders, we have to step out of our comfort zone, listen, reflect, and reframe.
00:35:33.440Somehow, according to the Associated Press, the two men stole a gold crown and an orb dating back to 1611.
00:35:40.380They were made for a king, King Carl IX and his funeral, jewel-encrusted crown dating back to 1625 that was used with Queen Christina's funeral.
00:35:52.940So they took the orb, the staff, and two crowns.
00:35:57.500Now, well, let me just give you the rest of the story.
00:36:00.080The items were on display at an exhibition, and people were inside when all of this was just taken.
00:36:09.300Two men smashed the security glass protecting the artifacts.
00:41:12.280So it's, I don't know, the mid or late 80s and probably 1989, I think.
00:41:20.800And I had gone over to do a USO thing, you know, on an aircraft carrier.
00:41:27.540And then I decided to take a few weeks off and just, you know, just hang out in Italy and Germany and just kind of, you know, do what 20-year-olds do, I guess, you know, drink.
00:42:23.680So we spent, you know, all Christmas Eve, you know, just drinking and, you know, and just kind of going around and just being, you know, Christmas jovial Americans.
01:10:01.980She's 66 years old, professor of German and comparative literature at New York University.
01:10:06.740She apparently is the real victim, even though she allegedly sexually harassed a former student.
01:10:13.380The New York Times wrote about the whole ordeal in an article titled What Happens to Hashtag Me Too When a Feminist is Accused?
01:10:20.820Well, we all know the feminist is in the right.
01:10:25.820Ronell, quite publicly, has been accused of sexually harassing Nimrod Reitman, 34 years old, graduate student and currently a visiting fellow at Harvard.
01:10:36.800Now, Ronell is an, you know, an academic rock star, as one colleague described him, one of the very few philosopher stars of the world.
01:10:45.280But the investigation concluded that the teacher, the professor, was the one responsible for sexual harassment, both physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of the student's learning environment.
01:12:23.860Most starting startingly is the one from 50 of her colleagues, all the educators from around the globe.
01:12:34.120Quote, although we have no access to the confidential dossier, we have worked many years in close proximity to the professor and have accumulated collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as a teacher and a scholar.
01:12:48.780But also someone who has served as a chair of both the departments of German and comparative literature at New York University.
01:12:55.300We've all seen her relationship with students.
01:12:57.360And some of us know the individual who has waged this malicious campaign against her.
01:13:18.040She says, I take it as a regular rigorously necessary that Trump's mouth hole be the flapping aperture to funnel floods of racially unleashed aggression.
01:13:30.000The toxic spill of his language, part of the recourse to crucial intersection where Twitter meets.
01:13:41.040So here we have somebody who is too important to the cause, sexually assaulting someone, a young gay man, and she gets a pass.
01:13:56.400Because, well, she's in the right, she's in the right club.
01:14:00.460She's absolutely in the right club and she's too important to lose.
01:14:11.040So, um, we have somebody on the phone and I haven't talked about her yet because I just want to ask her myself one last time before I introduce her.
01:14:24.220Um, uh, give her the opportunity to back out, um, because I don't think this is going to go well for her career, uh, unless we change her name.
01:14:34.900Uh, this is, I mean, this is how crazy things are, uh, have gotten.
01:14:42.140Uh, are you sure you want to have this conversation on the air?
01:14:45.000I know the rules of not saying where you work, but you're willing to put your name out there, which I mean, you know, there's this private eye called Google that will find you quickly.
01:14:53.800And I don't think this is going to go well for you in the long run.
01:14:58.360I want to tell your story, but are you sure?
01:15:02.680I have been praying for a couple of days about it.
01:15:05.500And I really feel like I'm supposed to be here giving hope to other conservative professors, giving hope to conservative parents who are worried about sending their kids off to college that I'm here to speak truth.
01:15:18.760But I also need to be respectful of the place that I work and the people I work with.
01:15:23.440And so it is a very difficult decision.
01:15:44.420Um, and you, uh, have been an adjunct professor at a, uh, at a good college and you're looking for full-time work and you don't think it's going to happen, uh, because of what colleges are like right now.
01:16:02.240Yes, because there's a very clearly documented hiring bias, both an anti-conservative hiring bias and an anti-Christian hiring bias, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, which is where psychology falls.
01:16:16.680Um, you, you have been teaching over the past eight years and you have said that there is a, a shift in, in attitude, um, even by the students now.
01:16:33.300Uh, when I first started teaching, it was exactly what I pictured as far as the dynamic between the professor and the students, where there was a clear distinction in roles, there was respect.
01:16:42.620And over the last, say, three to four years, I've noticed a shift where progressively students are becoming more emboldened.
01:16:50.940They see a blurring between the lines.
01:16:53.280There's, um, less respect for me as an authority figure and they feel like they can just challenge me.
01:17:04.080So they'll send me an email or they'll post something in the end of class survey, which is supposed to be anonymous.
01:17:09.880But they're, and some of them have gone to the administration behind my back to try to, you know, complain or what have you, because they feel that I'm too strict or they want to have accommodations where accommodations aren't due.
01:17:23.500So it's become more of a place of incivility on the students' part.
01:17:28.980Luckily, I've been able to manage it pretty well.
01:17:31.960And it hasn't escalated to the point where some professors, say like the professor at Berkeley who had students disrupt the final exam to protest it.
01:17:38.760Or Brett Weinstein, who had his class, you know, disrupted by protesters.
01:17:42.900I haven't experienced anything like that.
01:17:44.820Most of the time, the students are good in the classroom.
01:17:47.020It's outside of the classroom, especially when they feel emboldened by being able to post online or, you know, do something anonymous.
01:17:54.240You were teaching an undergraduate course on research methods.
01:17:59.660And you said, OK, let's look at the campus assault study, the campus climate survey that came out in 2015.
01:18:11.180And what did you have the students do?
01:18:12.720It was the point of the class and the lecture was talking about research validity.
01:18:19.120So looking at research studies and saying, is this actually valid?
01:18:22.520Does it does the results indicate what people are saying the results indicate?
01:18:26.760And I decided to take a risk and be bold and have them analyze the the campus sexual assault study and look to see, one, does it have like can it be generalized?
01:18:39.780And also, does it have internal validity?
01:18:41.840Do the way that they define the terms hold up to construct validity?
01:18:47.000And it was amazing to watch the class just become shocked because they've all heard the statistics cited.
01:18:53.100But when they actually dug into the study, they started to see its limitations very quickly.
01:18:58.180And to be honest, I've never been more terrified in a class than when I was standing there and openly challenging this study and guiding my students to think critically and analyze what the study actually said.
01:19:11.840When you say you have never been more terrified, what were you terrified of?
01:19:15.700I was terrified that I would have a student or students in the class that would react poorly to having that cognitive dissonance because clearly that's what they were experiencing.
01:19:28.380I was terrified that some would march out of the class and go and tell the administration.
01:19:34.740And I probably waited about a week or two thinking that the other shoe was going to drop.
01:19:40.640That somewhere, some way I offended a student that, you know, having their worldview or having this information challenged was going to create enough dissonance that they were going to react negatively.
01:19:51.300In this instance, it didn't happen, but it's definitely a risk every time I do it.
01:19:57.440I also had them challenge the wage gap study.
01:19:59.740I also had them challenge the climate change study that everybody quotes the 97 percent agree.
01:20:05.160I took a lot of risks in order to teach my students that they need to think for themselves.
01:20:09.980They need to actually analyze these studies rather than, you know, citing the talking points that the media and others have pulled from it.
01:20:17.980When you ask your class for counter arguments to things like microaggression, what happens?
01:20:26.860Most of the time, they don't understand what I'm saying.
01:20:30.780They think that there's just one position out there.
01:20:33.860They've never heard that there's anything else.
01:20:36.280They've never heard an alternative position.
01:20:38.440So there was an assignment that I had to use.
01:20:44.240But there was a question in there about microaggressions.
01:20:46.520So I told them the way I want you to answer it is to present me both sides.
01:20:50.600I want you to make an argument that microaggressions exist and are detrimental.
01:20:55.720And then I want you to make an argument against it.
01:20:58.000And I had to provide all of the resources for them to make the counter argument because they didn't know that a counter position existed.
01:21:06.220They had no idea how to start looking for that.
01:21:08.180It was pretty amazing to see that, that they weren't even aware that there's alternative positions to some of these things that have just been fed to them through their education.
01:21:23.540How do we expect to have a free people and a free press if people are being churned out in colleges and universities who don't even know how to look for the other side of the story?
01:21:37.640But I have found that many times the students are hungry to see the other side.
01:21:47.900They're excited when they see, wait a minute, I haven't heard that.
01:21:51.500Even if it doesn't change their mind, they're excited about it.
01:21:56.640I would say for the most part that I've seen most students when they get exposed to this information, when they get exposed to alternative, let's say, worldviews, something other than postmodernism, something other than critical theory.
01:22:14.320When they get exposed to alternatives, it's exciting to see because they realize that they aren't critical theorists.
01:22:22.680They realize that they aren't postmodernists.
01:22:24.180They actually do believe in objective reality and objective truth.
01:22:27.600And there's almost a relief for a lot of them that there's something out there that more closely aligns with the way that they do think or the way that they were raised.
01:22:37.940But I always have a group in there that resists, that they are just so dead set in what they've been taught that anything that brings that cognitive dissonance, they attack.
01:22:50.800One of the things I specialize in is actually teaching about marriage and relationships.
01:22:57.160And so I talk about gender differences, and I always have at least one student who yes buts me all the way through that lecture because they want to deny the fact that there's anything either biologically based or neurologically based that distinguishes the genders and distinguishes how men and women experience life and filter information and how we communicate.
01:23:20.080Which clearly there is, but I always have somebody in there that will push back.
01:23:25.000But the majority seems to really, like you said, be excited and hungry for it.
01:23:29.800In the 1990s, I read a quote from Immanuel Kant, and he said, there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.
01:23:59.000That's why I've gotten off social media, because that's a risk to my career.
01:24:04.260That's why I'm very guarded and very calculated about, you know, what I choose to say and bring up in class with my students, but also the way that I conduct myself around colleagues.
01:24:16.020I want to take a quick break and I want to come back and I you found, I think, an unlikely friend, a strange bedfellow that gave you some advice.
01:24:24.740I want to kind of talk about that when we come back with a professor of psychology that is going to remain nameless.
01:24:34.700This should tell you where we are as a nation.
01:24:37.640This person, I think if they gave their name, they would be out by the end of the day.
01:24:42.460Um, just for saying what she just said to you more in just a second.