- [Announcer] This is a production of PBS Charlotte.

- This week in Unspun, politics, protestors, and the press.

We'll talk with a former university president about political pressure from students, alumni, and politicians when they deal with demonstrations on campus.

Plus the top five, what politicians and the press don't tell you about protest and your opinions when peaceful protests become not so peaceful.

Unspun is next on PBS Charlotte.

(urgent music) In today's America, welcome to the spin game.

Believe me, I know.

I'm Pat McCrory.

When I was governor and mayor, I played the spin game.

I was played by the spin game.

But aren't we all done being spun?

Let's take the spin out of the world we're in.

Here, on Unspun.

(dramatic music) Good evening.

I'm Pat McCrory, and welcome to Unspun, a show that tells you what politicians are thinking, but not saying.

Let's start this week with a little history lesson.

Back in the sixties, we were a nation deeply divided with chaos on college campuses.

Police were clashing with protestors who occupied university buildings.

Schools were canceled and graduations were canceled, all because of demonstrations against an unpopular war and an unpopular president.

Sounds pretty familiar.

And don't forget the press coverage of those protests.

Newspapers and networks during the Vietnam War, which were creating their own controversy with anti-war headlines and commentary.

Even Walter Cronkite weighed in.

- To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence the optimists who have been wrong in the past.

To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic if unsatisfactory conclusion.

Well fast forward to today, and it feels like history is repeating itself.

Every campus confrontation is a top story on the nightly news Theres sympathy for anti-war protesters on the cable shows.

And criticism of college presidents who try to restore order on campuses.

In fact at UNC Chapel Hill, the protesters even replaced the American flag with a Palestinian flag, then surrounded police as they removed it.

But how many of those college protesters are actually college students?

How many are outsiders simply stirring up trouble?

In this election year, do the college protestors really speak for the youth vote?

I've said this before, the truth is most young voters aren't in college at all.

They're working and more worried about inflation and crime, the issues that often affect young people the most.

And those young voters who are still in school aren't paying top dollar tuition for protest demonstrations.

They want a college education and they don't want their classes canceled and their graduation called off because of the protestors.

Why don't we hear more from them?

Let's hear now from a former university leader who's seen his share of crisis on campuses and the political pressure that college presidents face when they have to make some of those tough decisions.

Phil Dubois was the chancellor at UNC Charlotte for 15 years when I was both mayor of Charlotte and governor of North Carolina.

Chancellor Dubois it's great to have you on Unspun.

Thanks so much.

- Great to see you.

- This has been an interesting several weeks as you I'm sure from an outsider, have watched the protest.

Kind of tell me some of the specific issues that you see chancellors have to deal with when there are campus protests, especially national campus protests.

- Well, I would say that chancellors and presidents have to deal with all kinds of crises, and protests would be one kind.

I once did a little presentation about crisis management and I could list 40 different kinds of crises, one of which would be protests like we saw in reaction to Gaza.

And we had similar things after the death of George Floyd.

So yeah, they're very common.

They're not new and they come around and in varying levels of severity.

- So as you've watched from an outsider as a retired chancellor where you were a chancellor at Wyoming and here in Charlotte, what observations did you have on how the chancellors of these primary Ivy League schools dealt with it?

- Well, you know, I haven't seen an after action review of any of those particular incidents.

I've just heard what you've heard on news reports that, for example, letting people bring in barricade material onto the campus would be sort of a strategic error.

But I think it's gonna depend a lot on the circumstances of every case.

And I followed UNC Charlotte very closely as well.

And eventually they had to physically remove them, but they did it with only one arrest.

So obviously Chancellor Gaber was mindful of trying to keep the campus safe and clear for access, but also to move people out when they had to be moved.

- Now it's pretty apparent that some of these protestors are not students.

So how do you balance this, dealing with students on campus, and it's supposed to be really for the students, but it's a public university with no fences around the university and dealing with the issue of outsiders, as I call agitators coming in to stir up potential violence?

- Well, of course at the time it occurs, you don't know they're outsiders.

You make the assumption that they're from your own community and then later when they're arrested, that it's determined that they're not affiliated with the university.

So you can't, I think the number one priority for most leaders in these situations is it's to secure the campus for safety and then also to secure the campus so normal activity can go on while giving the protestors as much leeway as possible to express their first amendment rights.

And in that, in my case, I always tried to give that a lot of patience.

As long as they kept the streets clear and the buildings open, I was okay with it.

In fact, way back on our founder's day, a few years ago, we were having defense secretary... oh shoot, he's just slipped my mind.

Bob Gates come to speak at the campus, but it was right after the murder of George Floyd and our African American students and other students wanted to do a die-in, in the student union.

And we allowed that to occur and the students agreed that they would keep the doors clear and the fire exits available.

And so we were able to reach a mutual accommodation.

Yeah, we have some outsiders come in, they don't wanna play by the rules.

- So there are two other balances you have also.

One is a lot of these campuses, the professors themselves are involved in the protest, and yet you have management responsibility over those professors and they're paid employees of the university and often of the state.

How do you balance your management of what their responsibilities are of a professor versus their rights to protest with the students?

- Well, their number one obligation is to make sure that their classes are met.

And if they're not meeting, they can pretty much do what they want as they would under any circumstances.

But yeah, I mean, if people voluntarily don't meet their classes and were to do it in a consistent way, you'd expect that there'd be some consequences.

And within the university rules of discipline, there are.

- The other balance is between those students who don't want to protest, and frankly, are paying tuition to go to class.

And then they find out, well, my classes have been canceled because of a minority group of protestors by volume.

So how do you balance that regarding your canceling classes that students are paying for because of a group of students who are legitimacy or exercising their right of free speech?

- I think you would find yourself canceling classes only if you couldn't protect the safety of the students, faculty and staff.

And so the normal default position is to keep classes going.

You've mentioned governor, several balances that chancellors have to do.

And I've said this often a lot lately that I loved being chancellor, but I don't miss it.

It's a very, very tough, tough job.

Lyndon Johnson, I used to keep a saying on my desk, you probably had it too.

He said, being president is like being a jackass in a hail storm.

There's nothing you can do, but stand there and take it.

And that's sometimes where you find yourselves when you have to balance off these contending values and interests.

- So there's a certain point in time where you have a protest or you have a terrible tragedy, and you had one of the worst tragedies in the national history of a mass shooting at UNC Charlotte.

I wanna compliment you on the way you handled it.

At what point in time, either during a mass shooting, which tragically you had, or during a protest turning violent, do you ask for help?

- Well, in our case, we had a mutual agreement with Charlotte Mecklenburg police.

And in the case of an event like that, it triggers automatically as soon as our police chief says he needs the help.

And so they were there within seconds really.

But it's nothing that the chancellor gets in the middle of at that point.

A chancellor's role is really in the aftermath trying to deal with the victims and their families and also helping the campus community recover.

But in these circumstances, we had 50 sworn police officers.

That wasn't gonna be enough, and they weren't all on duty at the same time.

That wasn't gonna be enough to deal with something like a massive crime scene like we had at in Charlotte.

- So during a protest, at what point in time do you need to talk to your alumni, to your board, to the governor, to the mayor?

How do you make those commun- 'cause you know, the breakdown's usually in communication.

- Yes.

- Not necessarily policy.

I learned that as governor and mayor, it's the communication often is the major issue.

- You know very well my special assistant Betty Doster and Betty was responsible for relations with the system office and with legislators and the governor's office.

So in the case of the shootings, for example, calls went out immediately to those folks to assure them that we were on the ground, that it was being managed, that we didn't have additional shootings underway, anything like that.

So really you have you, if you have a crisis management plan in place, everybody has their role and they'll do it.

And the chancellor's job is just to make sure every, that everything is going the way it was planned.

- One final question in the remaining 30 seconds.

What's the one recommendation you would make to chancellors at this point in time, knowing that there are gonna be future protests?

Come the Democratic and Republican Conventions, school's gonna be coming back in from summer break.

What's the one thing that you would recommend based upon your learnings and based upon what you've seen during the past six months and based upon the 1968 riots that you and I remember as younger people?

- Yeah, well, this was my watch word as a chancellor for my entire tenure.

Plan for the worst and hope for the best.

And they should be thinking right now, for example, what will happen when the political conventions roll in?

That's gonna be another one of those national events that has campus consequences.

And these protests can occur spontaneously.

And so they better have a good working plan about how to manage it and to move forward.

And hopefully they've learned from watching around the country, what are some of the things you can and should do in getting ready.

- Phil, we miss you here in Charlotte, but we wish you the best in retirement and we thank you for the legacy of a great campus and great university that you left us here in Charlotte.

Take care now.

- Thank you very much.

- Charlotte's Jeff Sonier takes Unspun on the street to hear your thoughts on the politics of protest.

- Yeah, we're here on the campus of Central Piedmont Community College talking with folks about those college protests we've seen on campuses all over the country.

(protesters shouting) - I think it's really brave of the college students to stand up for something that they believe in.

- And I feel like they're being silenced both by the government and by their own college.

These voices aren't being heard enough.

- They can let the campus know, like, and everybody know, that we're not gonna leave until something's done.

(protesters shouting) - I feel that everybody has a right to protest.

I just hope that they can understand what they're protesting for.

One person's terrorist could be another person's freedom fighter.

Some people in my generation were so quick to support things and not go back and do a fact check on what we're supporting, you know what I mean?

(people shouting) - [Jeff] When protestors take over a building, when they deface a statue, when they set up a camp, does that cross a line as far as you're concerned?

- I think it does because protesting is one thing.

Committing crimes is another.

When I was growing up, there was protesting the war of Vietnam.

So it's just history repeating itself, unfortunately.

(people shouting) if I paid that much money for you to go to school and you canceled the ceremony that I get to celebrate that, it's just widespread everywhere chaos.

- Yeah, most of the people we talked with here at Central Piedmont, they don't argue about the right to peacefully protest, but there is some disagreement over whether those protests we're seeing now on college campuses are peaceful or not.

Pat?

- Thanks Jeff.

So what do you think about the issue?

Email us your thoughts on the politics of protest to unspun@wtvi.org.

(dramatic music) Okay, tonight on our top five countdown, we've got the five things that I think politicians in the press don't tell you about protestors.

Let's start out with number five, central protest leadership.

Let me tell you something.

All the protest are coordinated by some sort of manager or coordinator that are usually paid then.

And they're working out of a central office and they're using the internet through Facebook, through Instagram, and through other communication means to communicate with people to get them to the event and also coordinate the message that they're actually saying.

Let's go to number four.

There's actually professional protestors training to confront the police.

There are protestors that are trained to exactly tell the other protestors what to say, how to act, and also how to confront the police.

And sometimes these professional protestors actually have equipment with them, including skateboards to break the windows and then allow the other protestors who came to be peaceful, but they get involved in the violence, and the professional protestors understand this group dynamic.

Number three, coordinated protest signs and also messaging.

The fact of the matter is the messages that you see on protest signs are all prearranged and they're usually the same messages that go out throughout the nation on the issue that they're protesting.

The messages are coordinated and it's not like the old days with signs that were made in your kitchen.

These are professional signs, the same type of signs that you see at political conventions.

And number two, media specialists for coverages.

Why do you think the media's there right when the protest starts?

It's because they've been called by a media specialist and they know exactly when the protest is gonna start and they want the media there.

The goal is to get as much free media as possible.

And in fact, a big secret is the protests like to start right when the local news starts.

And then when the local news ends, sometimes the protestors go home because their goal was to get on the news.

And number one, who do you think pays for all these protestors?

It takes money.

And the money often comes from influential donors, special interest groups, nonprofits whose goal is to push a specific agenda, usually either from the far left or the far right.

In fact, it's been investigated that some protest money actually comes from outside the country.

So if you really wanna find out the details of protest and why they're there, follow the money.

Follow the money.

(dramatic music) Up next PBS Charlotte's Jeff Sonier joins me for Unspun one-on-one.

Jeff, I'm ready for you buddy.

- You know how it works, right?

We take the questions from this week's headlines and this week's topic.

I ask them, you answer 'em.

That's why we call it one-on-one.

- Got it.

- Top five.

You talked about different protesters using Facebook and TikTok and Instagram.

How much has social media changed the effectiveness of protests?

The coordination of protests.

- Well, it's helped recruit protesters and the logistics of protests.

Also, it's caused our police problems because if you remember during the protest in 2016 and here in Charlotte we had people blocking John Belk Freeway and other highways.

Well that was coordinated often through the internet and Facebook, and the police are going and they even tell where are the police at this point in time.

So they tell the protestors, you can avoid the police going on this street.

So it's a tough logistical issue for the police.

- Yeah, it used to be the police had the communications, now the protestors have communications as well.

- Perfect analogy.

- Hmm.

It's an election year, and you have to wonder, is the election year what's fueling the protests that we're seeing on the campuses right now?

- Yeah, I don't think it's coincidental.

I mean this has happened throughout history, including the big protests of 68 at the Chicago Convention.

And I think you tend to have more political coordination during the presidential election year.

And with that political coordination, you get a lot of youth who are looking for things to do and plus often they're paid to do those things.

So there's a lot of money floating around during political campaigns and trying to influence elections and influence media coverage of those elections.

And at the same time, they're putting pressure on the candidates to react to the protestors, and they have a much stronger voice than their numbers show because of the media coverage.

- Now you mentioned Chicago and you mentioned the convention.

I saw a story this week where there's already negotiation going on between the convention coordinators and the police in Chicago and the protest organizers.

What's going, a lot going on behind the scenes before we ever see the first protestor on the street?

- Well, it proves the point of the top five, there's someone in charge.

Now who elected that person?

We don't know.

Who nominated that person?

We don't know.

But that person's usually on someone's payroll, and therefore that person has the leverage to negotiate with the people that they are gonna try to cause anarchy during the Democratic convention.

And the question for the Democratic party during their convention and maybe also in Milwaukee, can you trust negotiations with potential anarchists?

Whose main goal is to get free media, get their message across and often calls anarchy.

- Yeah, I know from covering conventions in the past, I know that part of the negotiation is where do they get to protest?

Is it near the convention?

Is it within the sight of the cameras?

That's part of the process.

- Oh, you go to, I've been to many conventions, political conventions, and they have huge fences several blocks away from the convention site for security reasons.

And the real security occurred after 9/11.

So after 9/11 you needed that security for potential terrorism.

But now they're kind of using that security as an excuse.

Let's get the protestors as far away as possible.

The protestors are trying to go around those types of barriers that get 'em away from the TV cameras.

- Yeah, you probably remember those high fences and barriers that were here in Charlotte during the Democratic convention that can be equally effective to keep people out.

- Absolutely.

It's like the Berlin Wall.

I mean, you can't get through 'em, but it also, those fences help the police in coordinating where the protestors are, especially the violent protestors are.

- We're gonna talk about the convention in a future show.

Lemme talk about the press.

You mentioned this during the top five that the protest starts at 6:01 with the newscast and ends at 6:29 at the end of the newscast.

How much does the press feed or fuel the protests itself?

- Well, protests are like car wrecks.

It leads the news.

And people like to slow down for car wrecks on the highway.

They like to see protests, even if they don't like what the protestors are saying, people will stick around and watch the first five minutes of the six o'clock news because there's potential violence, there's conflict.

It's like an acceleration of the old Jerry Springer show.

It's the worst of America when, especially when we wanna see violence and yelling and screaming.

There really is no constructive dialogue during these protests, especially if the goal of the protestors is to cause anarchy.

- And I know that we talked before about these protests potentially showing up at the convention, but right now they've been mostly concentrated on college campuses.

Why college campuses?

- Well, first of all, the protests are about the Middle East situation.

And right now all the major campuses have a lot of Middle East students that they recruit students from China, students from the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, many countries in the Middle East.

Why?

Because those students have a lot of money and they pay full tuition.

So the people leading these protests know, well, we've got an audience of people, of kids whose parents are still in the Middle East and therefore they're gonna be emotional about this topic and more radical about this topic in our country, not theirs.

- Yeah, regardless of who's con conducting these demonstrations, it's hard to escape them when you watch the nightly news.

Thank you Governor McCroy for your participation.

And that's this week's Unspun one-on-one.

(dramatic music) - So tonight we're wrapping up our show with an unfiltered segment.

This week I want to talk about a violent protest that occurred here in Charlotte in the fall of 2016 while I was governor.

At that time, a tragic police shooting occurred and much misinformation about the shooting was communicated through the media.

That misinformation brought well coordinated protests to our city streets, which escalated to violence.

In fact, one person was killed and millions in damage was done in uptown Charlotte.

My SBI director at the time told me at that time that outside groups were actively involved in initiating most of the violence.

I'm separating protesters from agitators.

We have some people whose goal is anarchy, and not to respect the rule of law whatsoever.

And that's the toughest job for our police officers, and we need to recognize that.

- So when I declared the state of emergency and called out the National Guard and the Highway Patrol to help Charlotte Police restore order, not all the local and state politicians supported that action.

In fact, it took 15 hours to get the Guard and the State Troopers to Charlotte.

And that's when I transferred all of the command that I had as the authority as governor to the control to the Charlotte Police Chief.

Because during a crisis, you need one leader, not two.

And that evening we took back control of our city from the violent protestors while letting the peaceful protests continue.

The Charlotte riots in 2016 were stopped through teamwork and keeping politics out of the government response to protect our cities and our citizens.

It was a case study of how the system should work that sadly hasn't been followed in other protest situations we've had since then.

Well, that's the reality as I see it.

Thanks for joining us.

I hope you'll come back next week as we preview the presidential debate.

Our special guest will be Chuck Todd, political analyst for NBC News.

That's next time on Unspun, where we'll tell you what politicians are thinking but not saying.

Goodnight, folks.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] A production of PBS Charlotte.