As you may or may not know, I made a documentary film entitled THIS DIVIDED STATE. The film chronicles Michael Moore's controversial visit to Utah Valley State College 2 weeks before the 2004 presidential election. Protests, bribery, and death threats descended upon the school in a fanatical effort to cancel Moore's speech.

One of the key players of the documentary was Joe Vogel. Joe was the Student Body Vice President and was ultimately responsible for inviting Michael Moore. In the end, Joe was forced to resign from his office and lost a scholarship because of his involvement in the Moore fiasco. As facts began to emerge about Joe's resignation, it became clear that it was because of a "tell all" book that Joe was writing that caused many people in the college administration and Utah legislator to get extremely angry at Joe. They asked Joe to "vow on oath of silence" about the book. Joe said "no." They said, "You must resign."

You see, Joe had been present in many secret meetings and had heard first hand the corruption that lied under the surface of the quiet Utah town of Orem. Now, that book, full of explosive facts and extremely frightening accounts is hitting book shelves nationwide. Joe has called it FREE SPEECH 101. And he's naming names and pulling no punches.

Not only does it talk about the Moore controversy, but expounds on the growing trend of colleges and universites becoming corporations owned and controled by those with money, power, and agendas. A very important book...

I just finished reading an advance copy of my friend joe vogel's book, free speech 101. my getting to read an advance copy was contingent upon me writing a review for it. so here it is. in all seriousness, it was an excellent read that i would recommend to anyone and everyone. it comes out in mid august. you can reserve a copy for only $9.97 at amazon.com.

Do conservatives fear free speech? Rather than merely answering this question, Joe Vogel recounts his experience as a Vice-President of UVSC's student body responsible for inviting the 'liberal' filmmaker Michael Moore to speak just weeks before the monumental 2004 presidential elections. Though the story behind Free Speech 101 takes place in Utah County, it is a paradigm example of the struggles that occur as a predominantly conservative community is confronted with new ideas and new voices. As a key participant in the event, Vogel provides behind the scenes insights of the battle for free speech, showing how some may use their politics, power and money to silence ideas that differ from their own.

Through his own first-person narrative, Vogel illustrates that the fight for free speech is not an issue only affecting nations and communities, but is an issue strongly affecting each individual member and voice of those communities — liberal or conservative.

Joseph Vogel's book, aptly titled Free Speech 101, gives us a startling look into the state of free speech in our country. Within this book Mr. Vogel, a 23-year-old resident of one of the most conservative states in our union, finds himself thrown into the heart of a debate that is echoing off the walls in our nations capital. The book is an insightful look into our countries civil liberties and the state of free speech. It asks an important question. Free speech: Do we have it? The answer may surprise you.

Joseph Vogel, then the Vice President of the Academic Senate at the Utah Valley State College, writes of his first hand experience attempting to express free speech. What he learns, and shares with us in this book, is interesting in that it mirrors on a small scale, what is currently taking place in our nation as a whole. The struggle he faces in the student senate could just as well be, and in fact is, taking place in Washington D.C.

Mr. Vogel invites Michael Moore, the acclaimed film director of Fahrenheit 9/11, to his campus to speak. In practicing this basic act of free speech Joseph Vogel is faced with a firestorm of opposition, in the form of hatred, death threats and bribes. The irony of course is, this onslaught of opposition is successful only because those who are attacking Mr. Vogel are using their right to freely express themselves. Mr. Vogel does his country a service by writing this story.

One can only hope that this book is placed into a time capsule, so that one-day, our children's children can read it and know [that we] tried.

I just finished reading Joe Vogel's book, Free Speech 101: The Utah Valley Uproar Over Michael Moore and I must say it was a terribly interesting read.

Now, I imagine all of you who read this know that I care about politics and the goings-on in the world and I happen to like Michael Moore. You probably all know that I am also what some people call (in a negative connotation) a "liberal." You also all know that I worked for a long time on This Divided State and am quite outspoken. I just wanted that out of the way before I get into explaining why this book is a "must read."

Joe Vogel is a self-described "conservative." Joe Vogel doesn't exactly agree with Michael Moore. Joe Vogel is probably someone that I would get into very friendly but fierce debates about politics if we were to come upon the subject. As it stands, I've only spoken to him a few times, interviewed him with Steve a couple of times and I interviewed him at the premiere of the film. I'm only guessing we'd get into debates since he doesn't actually talk about his personal politics all that much in the film beyond his admission of being generally conservative. (On a side note, who cares what people label themselves as, really?) But, at the end of the day, you get the impression that no matter how much of a lunatic you are and how preposterous your ideas and opinions might be, Joe Vogel is the sort of guy that would listen respectfully and answer with thoughtful care. He's the type of guy you'd have fun talking politics with, no matter how radically your opinions differed.

Anyhow, the book takes us through the decision making process behind bringing Michael Moore to Utah County and the intense pressure that Joe and Jim Bassi went through to make sure the event happened. This Divided State is a very public look at the controversy, but Free Speech 101 takes us behind the closed doors and shows us how bad things really got. Really: if you thought things were bad by watching our film, this book will turn your hair white.

I was surprised at how much opposition was faced, not from the community, but from within the school itself. Reading the book, you get an anxiety-filled taste of the extreme pressure that Joe was going through. Perhaps my perception of the pressure was augmented by a couple of things, though. First, I had intense pressure and stress stemming from the same issues but to different ends and second, I spent a year of my life watching and re-watching every little bit of vitriol and each of the characters in the book (with few minor exceptions) I was able to assign faces and voices, too. Having been there, I was able to truly relive it through Joe's words and to say that it caused a stir in me is an understatement.

The book made me want to get up and do something about politics again. It reinvigorated my disdain and disgust for the whole "UVSC-Michael Moore" situation and the current political situation and climate. I feel like I've been phoning in my involvement in the mid-term elections, largely through this blog and reading this book made me want to change that. Any apathy that I may have developed in the last few months has been erased completely by Free Speech 101. (Seeing a book in print written by what I would consider a peer (hopefully not arrogantly so) also lit a fire underneath me to redouble my efforts to finish the novel I'm working on.)

The best thing about the book, however, was that none of that was what the book was about. The book was about the personal trials Joe went through to protect the very soul of free speech. The book illustrated how fragile a thing it is and hinted at the idea that we should be out there doing what we can to protect it, whether we agree with what people have to say or not. It was a refreshing thing to read, despite having to relive a taste of Joe's stress.

I had talked to Steve briefly about the book, he'd received an advanced copy to read, and he had mentioned to me what he felt was a glaring omission in the book. That omission being the reconciliation between Jim and Joe. I would have to strongly disagree with Steve about this. I don't think the point of the book was Joe's travails as a person. The book was about Joe's travails as a steward of free speech and adding in something ancillary to that would have side-tracked the book. I'm sure Joe could have ran off on tangents throughout the book about how this strained his personal and professional relationships, but they would have been distractions. I admired the fact that Joe didn't use this book as a personal soapbox for people being mean to him or angry or unfair or how they made up afterwards. The book kept a razor-sharp focus on the issues of free speech and I think it benefits for it.

Everyone on both sides of the political spectrum would benefit from reading this book. Even though the "detractors" of free speech in the book are conservatives, it's not hard to imagine similar reactions from the opposite end of the spectrum against a "conservative speaker." The book, as I hope This Divided State is, is an excellent means to learn how you shouldn't go about communicating your ideas. As such, the book is a valuable learning guide and I would highly recommend that all who read this blog read Joe's book.

(On a side note, I found it ironic that a book about freedom of speech and expression in an open society has all of the naughty words dashed out. It seemed silly, given the subject matter of the book. One letter was even "edited for vulgarity.")

(I must also say that I apologize for any glaring mistakes in my writing. I'm always conscious about mistakes and fix them when I catch them. I don't have an "editor" so I do my best.)

UPDATE: Joe emailed me to explain that he's a self-described "independent." I want to apologize for the confusion. I was referring to a moment in the book where he calls himself "personally" conservative. Didn't mean to give anyone the wrong impression.

...If you find stories like these entertaining, and who doesn't enjoy a story about a good person being plagued by pesky, hypersensitive fools, then you absolutely have to read Joseph Vogel's Free Speech 101. It is the granddaddy of all Good Person Being Plagued By Pesky, Hypersensitive Fools stories. You may have heard about it. It not only made national news, but was even turned into a critically acclaimed documentary, This Divided State.

For those of you who don't already know, here's what happened to Joe in September of 2004: Vogel, then a twenty-three year old college student at Utah Valley State College, had been recently elected Student Body Vice President of Academics. The student government at UVSC had the somewhat unique privilege of being allowed to make relatively important decisions for the college, for the most part without giving any particular faculty member ultimate responsibility or veto power. Vogel was given a budget of 50,000 dollars for the academic year and the task of providing "academic opportunities and events for both the students and the community, which include[d] finding speakers."

One morning at the beginning of the Fall term, Student Body President Jim Bassi sent an e-mail to Vogel with an attachment from the Greater Talent Network, an organization that was promoting Michael Moore's Fall '04 Campus Tour. Bassi's e-mail read, in part, "Can you imagine the turnout?"

Vogel agreed, and began thinking roughly along these lines: "If we got Michael Moore to come speak, that would be a huge draw. Turnout would be big. And he's such a controversial speaker. This would get a lot of press for the college. We've been wanting to get out of the shadow of BYU. This might do it. It'll get a lot of people talking about the college, maybe stir up debate and controversy, raise the profile of the college."

When he found that his budget was not big enough to afford Moore, who was asking (and getting) 40,000 dollars for a speaking fee and 10,000 for travel, he decided he could make the money back by selling $5 tickets to the public. If they filled half the auditorium, he calculated, they'd make half the money back and would put him back in budget. Okay! Let's do it!

So he did. And then the school went nuts. And the town went nuts. And the state went nuts. And I mean nuts. The anti-Christ? Coming to the most conservative campus in the most conservative county in the most conservative state in the country?

"Half the state of Utah believed that UVSC was suddenly taking a sharp plunge into hell — and I was the one responsible for it," Vogel wrote, and as he begins to detail the reaction of the community: the death threats, the lawsuits, the bribes, the insults, the bulletproof vests he was asked to wear, the yanked donations, the legislation put into place in Salt Lake City to take autonomy away from student governments, the state government punishing the school by refusing to fund a new library, you realize Vogel wasn't exaggerating. He thought there'd be some controversy, sure, but nothing like this.

The college President, in a desperate effort to reach a compromise, forced Vogel and Bassi to hire conservative blowhard Sean Hannity for "balance," although as Vogel points out, the conservative speakers the college had booked in the past, such as Alan Keyes and Orrin Hatch, never had a liberal speaker added after them to the schedule for balance.

As the outrages rises to unfathomable levels, Vogel gears up for a battle of wills, because what bothered him the most, as I hope will also bother you, is not that the people in the community did not want to hear Michael Moore speak. It was that they didn't want anybody else to hear him speak, either. They did not want Moore sharing his liberal views with people who wanted to hear them in their town, and they tried to use their money, their lies, their threats of violence, and the manipulation of state laws to prevent it from happening.

As Vogel relates his narrative, he also delves into the whys of his opponents' behavior. Was it because it was an election year? Was it because of the perceived red state/blue state divide? Was it because Moore was the "embodied enemy of truth, goodness, and patriotism," and the thought that the college would pay such a person to speak was too much to bear? Did loathing for Michael Moore blind them to our Constitutionally protected right to free speech? Or worst of all, do conservatives fear free speech?

This is the question posed as a subtitle under the book's title, and when reading the book, I couldn't help feeling more sadness on Vogel.s behalf than outrage. Here is a very young adult, charged with making adult decisions for the first time, in the community in which he was raised and whose values he thought he shared. Is he a conservative? Yes. Does he love God and America and Mom and apple pie? Yes. Does he believe in the Constitution? Yes. And as a believer in the rightness and justice of the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, he believes that minority speech should be protected. He believes that college is the place to hear all points of view, and to learn to think independently and critically. And to have his community turn on him so viciously for having such an earnest belief in the Constitution is heartbreaking. To watch a community that he'd previously perceived as "educated and enlightened" titter and giggle their way through Sean Hannity's bullying speech, a lecture that strikes Vogel as a "hate rally," is disillusioning. To be a kid standing against so many powerful adults shouting at him and threatening him for two months, adults he was raised to believe in and respect, is crushing. One adult in particular, Kay Anderson, gets so carried away with his quest for vengeance that he nearly becomes a cartoon villain, trying every trick in the book short of twirling a pencil-thin mustache while tying Vogel's fiance to the railroad tracks.

In the end it takes an outsider to accurately diagnose what ails the community. During an anti-Moore rally in the student center, Ephraim Amou-Berry, a student from Togo, West Africa, takes the microphone and says, "I come from a country where the freedom of speech does not exist. When I came here to study as a foreign student, I'm proud of something you guys have here, and you don't know the value of it."

According to Vogel, many in the audience were moved to tears by his impassioned pleas, but I saw Amou-Berry give this speech in the documentary This Divided State. I saw the majority of students letting his minority views fall on deaf ears. What a shame they were unable to simply do the same for Moore.

P.S. . And if you're not interested in any of that, and you just want the scoop on exactly how big a tool Hannity is, you're in luck. (Answer: Sean Hannity is a very, very big tool. Huge.)

In 2004 a "hurricane" hit Utah Valley, and the eye of the storm was here at UVSC. This storm was called "Hurricane Mike." Joe Vogel, then ASUVSC Academic Vice President, invited Michael Moore to speak on campus. The result was exactly what Vogel wanted-to create a dialogue and to get students involved in the 2004 elections. For a state school that is seeking university status Vogel thinks that "Hurricane Mike" did more good than bad. He says that it helped the school's name be recognized, and made a more credible institution because we stood up for academic freedom. Vogel says that this time was the "most alive UVSC has ever been. It felt like a real Campus."

On Tuesday October 10, 2006 Joe Vogel returned to UVSC to speak about his experience. He showed a clip from the documentary "This Divided State," and had a question and answer period at the end. Hosting the event was the UVSC English Club.

When asked why he wrote Free Speech 101 he said it was to "reflect on the experience I had. It really was like a hurricane."

After the hurricane the damage was not as severe as anticipated. Many of the letters that Joe Vogel and Jim Bassi, ASUVSC President, received said that parents would not allow their children to attend UVSC in the future, and many students would withdraw. At first there was a drop off in admissions, but since then it has not been significant. One outspoken Utah Valley resident shown in the video (possibly Kay Anderson) said that we "don't want the world in Utah County-it is a safe haven from the world."

Vogel also received hate letters, some so severe that there were threats made against his life. Both Vogel and Bassi feared that somebody would throw bricks through their windows, and they were asked to wear bulletproof vests on the day Michael Moore came to speak. Vogel says because of his heritage, and experience as an LDS Missionary he thought that Utah Valley would be a fairly tolerant community and would be open minded.

One of the reasons that so many people were upset about Michael Moore coming to campus was because of the money it cost to bring him to campus. According to Vogel that was a "red herring." The student government was given the same budget as previous years, and they had planned to earn it back by selling tickets to the public for a low fee, the event was sold out.

Jim Vogel's message on Tuesday was that "we live in an age of fear." Some of the fears that are out there are terrorism, the administration, and the Second Coming of McCarthyism. He says that we need to "make sure that we are not controlled by fear." He advises us that "we have to be vigilant as students and faculty members," and that we need to support academic freedom.

Vogel also offered some advice for the members of student government, and other students that don't feel like they share the same political views, or are different from the "Utah Valley Stigma," he says that there are "others like them, and there are others that will fight for what you want to fight for. Don't be afraid or back down from threats of anger, or irrational fear. When you do stand up people will come to your side and back you up."

Afterwards he signed copies of his book Free Speech 101. You can purchase the book in the Bookstore, or online at amazon.com.

Free Speech 101: The Utah Valley Uproar Over Michael Moore, is the story of the conflict generated during Michael Moore's 2004 Slacker Uprising Tour when author Joseph Vogel, then head of student government at Utah Valley State College, dared to extend an invitation for Michael Moore to come and speak. In the center of fiercely a conservative, passionately Mormon state, Moore's liberal and anti-President Bush views were harshly despised by a vociferous portion of the community. The result was offers of bribery, death threats, and legislative pressures aimed at preventing the UVSC from using student fees to fund an allegedly "viewpoint neutral" program to hear Michael Moore's words. Of course, no similar opposition was raised against conservative Sean Hannity's pro-Bush visit and speech. Vogel himself and many others passionately believed in the importance of free speech, and that true patriotism and being an American meant listening to all points of view before making a decision. The hard-fought battle just to allow Michael Moore to speak, and its outcome, is accounted in vivid detail from an insider's point of view - an author who knows well the history of religious persecution against Mormons for practicing their beliefs, and therefore questions why so much intolerance against free speech exists in the state of Utah to this day. Highly recommended.