D’Souza urges former college volleyball player to defend free speech against coaches, administration

Kylee McLaughlin was the team captain for the UO volleyball team. She had expressed conservative-leaning sentiments on multiple occasions, with one of her coaches told her she needed to remove a tweet from Twitter. Despite obliging, she was forced to have solo practices before deciding to transfer to Ole Miss.

"So here's the University of Oklahoma, which has a star volleyball player, a woman named Kylie McLaughlin. Now Kylie McLaughlin got into trouble, you might say with her coaches. Her coaches are named Lindsay and Kyle Walton," said D'Souza. "And she got in trouble with her coaches for what? Basically for expressing conservative views."

"But when the team showed a Netflix documentary called 13th, which was evidently all about slavery, McLaughlin apparently said 'that while she agreed slavery was 100 percent wrong, she thought the film was slanted left.' And she said, particularly the film went out of its way to criticize Trump. And she said 'black incarceration was higher than other racial groups while representing a smaller overall percentage of the population,'" said D'Souza.

"In other words, an absolute factually true statement. If you pretty much go to any of the prisons for violent inmates, you discover blacks who are about 13 percent, 12 to 13 percent of the population, are like 50, 60, 75 percent of the prison population," D'Souza continued. "It's hardly a controversial statement. It's merely a statement of fact."

D'Souza added that McLaughlin had tweeted about the University of Texas wants to get rid of their song "The Eyes of Texas," saying not to do that. Coach Lindsey Walton told McLaughlin to delete the tweet. Kyle Walton told McLaughlin, "I'm not sure I can coach you anymore."

"So she deleted the tweet. And she apologized. So she backed down, I think in the name, not because she regretted when she said I don't think, but to make peace," said D'Souza. "But evidently, the coaches decided the damage was done. So they told her to listen, you know what, from now on, if you want to do practice, you got to practice on your own."

D'Souza goes on to say that McLaughlin ultimately transferred schools and filed a lawsuit "against the university and against the coaches on the fact that she was denied her athletic scholarship and ultimately driven out of the university because of her speech."

He added that the University has said that McLaughlin could have stayed at the school and on the team and "that this is basically a ruckus of our own making."

The coaches have reportedly issued their statement on the matter, which disagrees with the University's statement.

"They're basically claiming, yeah, we have the right to throw somebody off the team because of free speech," said D'Souza.

"While plaintiff is free to make a bigoted statement, she was not free from the consequences of how her teammates received those statements," a portion of the statement from the coaches reads, according to D'Souza.

D'Souza then claims that there was "no known revolt from the team."

According to the previous reporting, team members had spoken up after comments made during the movie and her tweet referencing the University of Texas song.

"McLaughlin was branded as a racist and homophobe after those two incidents by her teammates and coaches," The Post Millennial previously reported.

And then [the coaches] basically say that the First Amendment cannot force her teammates, again the coaches are hiding behind the rest of the team, to trust the plaintiff or desire to play with her," said D'Souza. "And consequently, the coaches are saying that they're within their rights to cultivate a winning team atmosphere by and fostering team trust by throwing, if you will, uncooperative players off the team."

D'Souza added that he is "really hopeful that Kylee McLaughlin here takes it all the way fights it in court exposes that tyrannical mindset of these two coaches, and ignorant though the coaches may be, the administration is not ignorant."

"At the end of the day, it's important to punish these administrators, expose them, make the trustees come to terms with all this, maybe get some of these people routed out. The legal way is one way to apply pressure on these people," D’Souza said.

"So we need conservative institutions that are going to bring these cases. We already do have some. We need more to protect free speech in the many, many places around not just the campus, but around the culture, where it is gravely imperiled."