>> this year marks the 20th anniversary of the september 11th attacks. join us for live coverage from new york, the pentagon and shanksville, pennsylvania, starting at 7:00 a.m. eastern, saturday, on c-span. watch online at c-span.org or listen on the c-span radio app. >> jonathan zimmerman and signe wilkinson talk about their book "free speech and why you should give a damn." the book exploring the controversy through political cartoons. the national archives hosted this event and provided the video. >> many thanks to everyone at the national archives for hosting this event. as someone who obviously reverse

the ideals that are reflected in our anything's founding documents, which we've been working hard to approach in reality, the national archives for me is one of the most moving, inspiring places in the world and it's a great setting for this great book because john and signe's book brilliantly transmits our founding ideals to a younger generation, inspiring them to continue the enduring efforts to translate those ideals into present day realities for everyone. so i'm going to start with you, john. why did you write the book? who are your ideal readers? what message do you want to convey? >> well, the real reason i wrote the book is that signe wilkinson emailed me and asked me to write it. and when you get an email from her you act. we are talking about one of the great cartoonists of our era, of

our times. it would be like the football player was asked if he wanted to play with tom brady, like the answer is yes. and when i started to write it i realize what had my real message was, it was a message to people younger than me, which, by the way s almost everyone at this stage, but mainly to my students and also to my young adult daughters, because in my experience many people in the younger generations from developed a skepticism about free speech and in some places have even developed animosity towards it. this was very much crystallized for me during this kind of seminole meeting that i had with mary beth tinker. mary beth tinker, of course, being the 13-year-old girl who wore the black arm band to school in des moines, eye i can't, in 1965, was sent home and later sued with the others and this became the tinker v. des moines case in which the supreme court upheld student speech rights. any way, mary beth tinker came

to my class at the university of pennsylvania and told her story with the arm band and then the students started asking questions and the first question was, look, ms. tinker, you were fighting the good fight. you were fighting the war in vietnam. these people today that spew hate, racist and sexist hate, these home mow foebs and tran foebs, they just want to hurt people. why should they be allowed to speak? and mary beth tinker had a very pointed response which i will never forget. she said, listen, at my middle school in des moines there were students that had dads and uncles and brothers that were risking their lives in southeast asia. you don't think they were hurt by this not-nosed kid telling them that their loved ones were maybe going to die for a lie? of course they were. speech hurts. and that's precisely why we need to protect it. because it hurts there's always going to be the impulse to snap

it down, but when you do it's actually the people at the bottom that are going to be hurt and i mean really hurt, i.e., censored and that was mary beth's other message. some of the students said, look, free speech is just something about power. people with power use that term to protect their own speech than to prevent others from using it and mary beth said you have it wrong, it's the opposite. in 1965 i was a 13-year-old girl and speech was the only power that i had. and across time and this was the real message of the book, people without power have used free speech to challenge their circumstances and to challenge their oppression, which is really what she was doing because until that time students really didn't have any rights. not ones that the constitution recognized. so that's really what i wanted to communicate to my students and to others. the radical history and potential of free speech. >> i hadn't known that story

about signe being the instigator of the book. signe, i have to say john has such a great sense of humor i know know when he's teasing but i gart this was literally how the book came into existence. can you tell us what prompted you to reach out to him and to contribute your brilliant cartoons? >> well, i've been cartooning for almost 40 years and i depend on the free speech amendment every single day really and i've seen so many times when people have criticized me saying she can't say that. i was once speaking at a cartoonist convention and we had visitors from the middle east, all men, and i was on the podium and i was speaking and they said

to the host, is she allowed to say that? which, by the way, was the title of molly ivan's book, the great and very provocative writer of -- who died about ten years or so ago. but, anyway, it's crucial for cartoonists and cartoonists around the world have been imprisoned and sometimes even killed because of their cartoons. they've gone into exile or underground, even after the cartooning controversy in the early 2000s, an artist in seattle did a cartoon about mohammed day and it was teasing and making fun of the controversy. it wasn't an attack on islam and yet she was put on a fatwa list

and has gone underground and has -- you know, that shouldn't be in the united states of america. and that's current. that was, you know, within the last ten years. the other thing i really want to say and i will say it again is that i've been called everything, and i've been picketed. our paper has been picketed. but we invite the picketers in and they, then, get a place in the paper to respond and then it goes back and forth among readers. so my belief is that really controversial cartoons just like controversial statements, records, movies, books, they don't end a conversation, they begin one. and sometimes it takes something pretty controversial just to get

people to really engage in the issues. so for me it's free speech is just -- it's like the platform on which i stand and so do the cartoonists of -- the rest of the cartoonists in the united states of america. >> thank you very much. i recently was reminded that you are one of many -- not many, a small group of illustrious cartoonists from around the world who was interviewed for a fourth coming book that is going to focus specifically on cartoon censorship. getting back to this wonderful book with wonderful in prose and in pictures, john, since the book is aimed at students and presumably their teachers as well, it's especially interesting for them to understand their own free speech rights and the challenges to them so they understand that

this is not just affecting other people at other times in history in other parts of the world. so what do you tell them? what's their stake in these issues now? >> well, their stake is enormous. it's enormous because before mary beth tinker schools could silence anybody that they wanted. universities in some places as well. and it's really only in the last half century that young people have received any kind of speech rights that, again, are, you know, enforced by law and by courts, but i think the most important thing to remember is all these rights are extremely tenuous and they are always under attack and that's precisely why we have to study their history and we have to be vigilant about protecting them. so right now there's a case that just made it to the supreme court about a cheerleader in northeastern pennsylvania who was disciplined by her school for a text message that she sent on a saturday from a convenience

store. this is after she had failed to make the cheerleading team and she texted "f" school, "f" cheerleading and the school disciplined her and said she couldn't be on the cheerleading team. they said they needed to do this in order to protect order. well, that's always what censors say, is it not? there's going to be some terrible consequence. people are going to say or do or think the wrong thing and we've got to blot it out. but of course where does this end? most educators that i know did not get into the business in order to monitor people's snap chats and instagrams. and i think this is a really important compelling example of why, a, we have to be aware of how recent this history is, that there have been any threats at all and b and most importantly

we have to be vigilant about protecting them. >> i'm proud to say that that current case, the mahoney case is an aclu case as was the tinker says, as have been every single one of the supreme court's free speech cases going all the way back to the 1940s and the implications as you indicate, john, are enormous because schools are basically saying they have authority to regulate anything that might potentially disrupt the school. i think -- i can't see an exception to that that would essentially squelch meaningful free speech for students, but what about teachers? what's their stake in this? >> well, i would say in some ways the stake is even greater because, alas, i think the courts have been even less attentive and protective of teacher rights than they have student rights. so, you know, in 2007 a teacher named deborah mayer was teaching

the fifth grade glass about the war in iraq, actually, it was in 2003, the case was in 2007 and she was teaching a lesson from a student-approved magazine time for kids which included a description of a picture of an anti-war protest in which there were many around the time we invaded iraq and a kid in the class asked her, ms. mayer, have you ever been to an anti-war protest and the response she said, yes, as a matter of fact, i drove by one in bloomington -- this is indiana the other day -- and i honked my horn in approval. because of that she was not reappointed by the school. and the courts have upheld that, you know, arguing that teachers essentially have to sell their free speech rights to the district in exchange for their jobs. i think a lot of us wonder how the teachers can actually model discourse and indeed democracy if we hamstring them in that way. >> you know, i'd like to ask you both a question. i found the book so -- which i

read twice and learned a lot both times and i know a fair amount about free speech myself, i just finished teaching an entire semester-long law school seminar on freedom of speech and i still learned a lot and found it, you know, completely appropriate level for me, but obviously you are also aiming at a younger audience. what age range do you contemplate? i will first ask you, john. and i'm very curious whether you had to change your arguments or your presentations in any way and then i'd like to hear from signe on that as well. >> the answer is no. first of all, i'm amazed you read it twice, you must have been starved for entertainment, i guess the pandemic does that to people. to take your question i think we imagine anyone from age 11 or 12 up reading it.

i think that we conned send to our young people often by assuming that they either can't understand or won't care about these questions, but as the mahoney case illustrates i think that in some ways these questions are more urgent for young people than anybody else. and we absolutely wrote it in an idiom and in a tone that we hoped can really be understood by anybody from middle schoolers up. >> signe, i know that you have some of the cartoons, maybe this is an appropriate time for you to show some of them and comment on them and i'd love to hear john's comments about them as well. >> yeah, please, both of you, feel free to jump in. i'm just going to share my screen here. here is the book title. but because this isn't a new -- i'm going to talk about starting

with the cartoons. of course, they've been big in the news here the last couple decades, but pointed editorial political controversial cartoons go way back and so i thought i'd start with the guy who sort of credited to be the father of western cartooning and i'm sure you are all guessing exactly who it is, which would be martin luther. 500 years ago martin luther was protesting the influence of the pope and rome on his german community and his beliefs and to illustrate his feelings towards rome he hired local artists and

used the fairly new printing press to create wood cuts to illustrate his point. let's see here. >> well, i would have flunked that test. i would never have answered martin luther. >> there we go. here is one of them with a couple of his supporters sticking out their tongues, bearing their bottoms and farting in the face of the pope. now, this is not an image that i would have used in the daily newspaper -- in my world, but he -- the consequences of free speech for him were possible death at the time. so we will just fast forward 300

years, this is a clipped history, to a german immigrant to the united states who became america's greatest cartoonist ever and that is thomas nass. this is one of his iconic images of rich people in new york of the time, but he was also known for criticizing, absolutely skewering a guy named boss tweed who was the -- a political democratic political leader or democrat party political leader of his time. tweed said, i don't care what they printed in the newspapers, my constituents can't read, but stop them damn pictures. what people forget about nass

was that also he was a huge supporter of abraham lincoln and anti-slavery. he was against slavery, and lincoln called him my best recruiting sergeant. this is his brilliant engraving done just two weeks after the emancipation proclamation was signed. we can talk about cancel culture later, but he did do controversial cartoons that people still don't like and he has been canceled several times by several organizations and yet this is what he did for america. fast forward again to the early 1900s and then we get into some of the things that we talked about in the book with women's

suffrage. these women not only protested and marched, but about 20 or more cartoonists or women came out of their normal lives and started cartooning for suffrage. and as you know women went to jail, alice paul was in prison for her free speech rights so these women were using their pens, this is nell brinkley, any man who loves and reverse his mother and his country should idolize if he worships at all the three graces, suffrage, preparedness and americanism. sorry, my dog is going off on the mailman. and also at this time margaret sanger was actively agitating for rights for women for birth

control and getting attacked by police and driven off the stage time and time again. so this is from our book. go ahead, speak freely. and fast forward again to the man who was probably our most eloquent ever user of free speech, martin luther king, whose whole -- his only weapon was his free speech and he used it as we all know brilliantly and he paid for it, of course, with his life. but to put it in modern terms, i mean, if you switch how you look at things, the police who were suppressing and attacking him, we find your speech to be hurtful, dr. king. it was more than hurtful, of course. onward in my career religions

have been the most thin-skinned and sensitive. it's okay if you're praising them, it's blasphemy if you are not. we need to see it so we know what to ban. this was in a portion of the book about religion. and to prove that we shouldn't be taking them quite so literally, after the danish cartoonist debacle, there were many cartoon -- cartoons defending -- or protesting the attack on the cartoonists, but i was trying to go for a different point of view and this one is the big fat book of offensive religious cartoons with all our major religious leaders, including mohammed third from the right and it is that to make

the point i made earlier, that it's okay if people are laughing. if you're showing a religious figure or a political figure happy and laughing, that's okay, it's just criticizing when the image becomes remember boaten. this cartoon went around the world many, many times after all the cartoon controversies and never has been, you know -- never with a problem. back to our book. what jonathan has said and what -- i think the basic point of our book is is that you can't just muscle people and think that hated -- hated -- or hateful ideas will just go away. i fixed it. no, not exactly. so the one thing i'd like to

leave you with about cartoonists is that any teacher knows that it's usually a boy in the back of the room drawing bad images of the teacher, it's just a compulsion that some people have to make fun of the authority figure in front of them. cartoonists who are prominent take on the biggest, biggest authority figures there are. this man was a syrian cartoonist who criticized the syrian regime. he was taken, beaten and his hand stomped on to break them so he couldn't draw again. but his first cartoon in the hospital will show you the spirit of a cartoonist.

from his hospital bed. so there you have it. there's -- there's the cartooning spirit and just try to keep us down. thank you. >> that is so remarkable. i have to ask both of you, i'm thinking of, you know, the great sullivan, other great teams of collaborators, which came first the cartoons or the text? >> well, i wrote the text first and then -- and then signe wrote the cartoons, but i think actually the cartoons are really what make the book because i'm a words guy and i think that if you look, for example, at that terrific one about martin luther king which is my favorite cartoon in the book i think you get this kind of -- it's not this visual, it's almost a guttural embodiment of what the book is really trying to say, especially, you know, the awful

racist white cops, you know, what you're saying is hurtful to us. well, of course it is. i mean, just like mary beth's arm band was hurtful to kids who had dads fighting in vietnam. that's what speech does but that's the worst reason to try to censor it because once you make that into your rubric, again, there's not going to be any speech left. >> well, since you talked about the mlk cartoon and, signe, you talked about -- you gave the history of thomas nast with respect to emancipation and abolition, i had not known about that, so this is why i read your book twice, learn something new every time i interact with either of you. john, do you want to explain -- there are so many -- i wouldn't even say arguments today, but even assumptions that if you really care about racial justice

then you have to be very skeptical of free speech. and we see this all the time. we see signs on college campuses, hate speech is not free speech. in fact, even politicians who some of them graduated from law school say that and there is this assumption that, yeah, in the good old days maybe it was people like martin luther king who were being aided but now we know it's not that way, it's white supremacists it's unite the right, even supreme court justice elena kagan a couple years ago famously said free speech, the first amendment is being weaponized. to oppress people who lack power. >> yeah. >> you are a historian, john, bring us forward to the present, please. >> well, you know, i think there has been something that switched, i do think in a way it's generational, although justice kagan isn't young

anymore, but i think that we've lost sight of the radical potential of free speech. free speech is now -- it's like sandra johnson said patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. you will hear people say this thing about free speech and those are people who haven't thought much about the women suffragists that we saw in signe's cartoon. look at this panel right here. we've got the first female director of the aclu, the most important free speech organization in the history of the united states and the world, we've got the first woman to win -- for her cartooning. how far would women rights have gotten without free speech? the answer is nowhere, right? we wouldn't be here in this configuration without free speech. without the people that exercise free speech to challenge sexism and other kinds of gender discrimination. and i think we just need to look outside of our moment. look, at one level justice kagan

is right, surely awful people have and continue to, you know, embrace and, yes, weaponize free speech and for anyone who wants to read more about that, read nadine's book about hate and she's explicit about it, there is no reason to deny it. >> there are no cartoons in it. >> it's a great book nevertheless even without cartoons. to me the point of that book is we shouldn't try to pretend or wish away the presence of hate. it's a part of us and a part of our lives and indeed a part of our speech. but the answer to it is not to create some grand poobah either a university president, you know, or, you know, a tech company guru who is going to then tell us what's hateful and what isn't. that isn't the way democracy works. it's not the way america works. we can't do it. >> signe, another argument that

is constantly being made against the robust free speech that you and john are advocating so effectively, but a strong counterargument which john alluded to is hurt or harm, but i know from critics that they will say, no, those words are trivializing. i mean, we really feel deep psychic emotional trauma and there are even physiological implications, manifestations and, by the way, there are free speech problems, too, because this hurtful traumatizing insulting speech that denies our humanity silences us and chills our free speech. so if you really cared about free speech for everybody, especially the oppressed, why are you making fun? signe, how dare you create an

image of the prophet? don't you know how hurtful and traumatizing that is to muslims around the world. how do you answer that? >> well, first of all, a cartoon can't blow anybody up or decapitate anybody. it is just an idea and it is a way of reframing the argument. i think that -- i mean, the danish cartoonist controversy is kind of a good example. the danish imam who really started -- who was offended and went and really tried to get support in other countries and, you know, it ended up being riots in pakistan with people

killed. later it sort of just left. he was -- he was appalled by what had been unleashed by that -- by that fury. i think the editor of the paper also might have learned lessons from -- from how, you know, how everything was set off but i just have to back the cartoonist for being able to say, look, there's -- there is a conflict here, there is a conflict between -- with certain values that have -- that sort of new in our country and -- but that's not the end -- end of the conversation. you know, it's -- it's a conversation, it's not a one

side says something and that's the end of it. >> the other thing -- yeah, the other thing that i would add there on this subject and i think the danish cartoon episode is a good example that to me it embodies the condescension that lurks within so many of these calls for censorship. they're always offered in a protected idiom. it's like those sensitive muslims we have to protect them. but what are you really saying about them? right? if you're saying that we need to withdraw this image, signe's or anybody else's from the public sphere, i think you're saying in some ways that they are less than human. that they can't exert the same kind of self-control that the rest of us can. again, this is all in the guise of saying how you're so down with muslim people. to me it's insulting which isn't to say that it should be censored, obviously, but to me there's a real irony there. >> that was actually one of the points of fleming rose, one of

the reasons why he felt that it was completely appropriate to solicit those cartoons. it was a way of showing that these people are not only fully human, they are fully danish and it is part of our tradition in this country and at this newspaper to make fun of every religion. including whatever, you know, protestantism or whatever the predominant religion is there. >> well, just one point on that. when they first were published and before the outrage happened, several newspapers in the united states published them just as news articles, you know, no big deal. the austin statesman american and one of the denver papers, and there was no controversy. because people didn't know they were supposed to be outraged. but then when the controversy started none of our major papers would publish them.

you know, i can't even say this word right, but pucilaneous response of the "new york times" saying, well, you know, we're just not going to show them, we're not going to show our readers supposedly the smartest best greatest readership in the entire world couldn't take and process the fact that these were drawings on paper. >> well, doesn't "the new york times" completely decided to abandon all editorial cartoons at least in its overseas editions. >> oh, don't get my started on that, but needless to say even if they were hiring cartoonists i wouldn't be one of them. but they used to run a round up of cartoons in their sunday paper and it was very, very popular and that was a range of points of view and now they've even -- they even got rid of that. >> so this gets to a topic that you had alluded to earlier,

signe, a cancel culture, right? it's true, government officials are still censoring speech as in the case now pending in the supreme court, but we have a tremendous problem of self-censorship not only among supposedly fearless newspaper editors, but also among students and teachers which i think is a very serious problem. >> well, i'm not a student or a teacher, but i think jonathan spoke to that about, you know, free speech protects kids. you have to get out and exercise your rights. i mean, it's good for your muscle memory to remember that we have conversations and they can get animated and heated, but, you know, one of the -- one of the problems that seems to me right now is, you know, you look

at the -- you look at the nbc -- or the cnn news on one side and the fox news on the other and it's like they all are talking to themselves and we need a little -- let's have some more yell-fests. >> but, signe, look, you are a pulitzer prize winning cartoonist. john, what do you see to a 13-year-old kid who doesn't want to be ostracized by her classmates for saying something that's unpopular? she doesn't want to be falsely accused of being a racist or some other kind of -- >> look, the first thing i do is say i get it and this is not just -- i mean, it's not a gratuitous example because this happened to me at the university of pennsylvania after 2016 election. trump voters came out to me in my office and, you know, i would always say, look, i'm glad

you're telling me, i really wish you'd say this to class because to signe's point i think we would learn more. this is really a cultural and educational question to me, you know. if we're self-censoring, biting our tongues we are not learning from each other in ways that we could. often they would say it's easy for you to say, buddy, you are not going to have to face the wrath that i would and they're not entirely wrong. at brin more college near where i teach there was a student that posted something on the net in 2016 saying, hey, theres a trump rally in westchester is anyone going and could i get a ride and she was so vilified by other students including with physical threats and called the worst kinds of names that she dropped out of bryn mawr. so, you know, this is a huge problem. i think it's a problem that's bipartisan, i don't want anyone to think that it's only people on the left doing the canceling. look at all these state

legislatures that are saying that, you know, schools can't teach the 1619 project. what is that if not agricultural and brought to you by republicans. >> look at liz cheney. >> yes. >> she got canceled pretty bad. >> entirely by republicans. >> now, can we encourage young people to risk the censure of their peers and of their teachers by the way. we've seen some incidents unfortunately where teachers are not standing up for unpopular viewpoints, they are not all like you, john. >> look, i mean, i think this is where the history piece becomes so important, you know, recognizing that almost everybody that we've been taught to celebrate and appropriately as a "tribune" of social justice was also a great "tribune" of free speech right up to mary beth tinker and i could tell you that after mary beth came to my

class, i mean, i did see a difference in the way that the students related to this question. because, you know, i do think history can inspire as well as inform and when you read about figures like mary beth tinker or margaret sanger and what they risked by raising their voices, i think it can inspire you to raise yours. >> okay. well, that's -- i'm getting some questions from the audience and believing in audience free speech i would like to turn to the first one i see of those. is there a place where the right to free speech is rightfully curtailed, like when it inn sites violence. >> no right a absolute, you can't call the white house and say you're going to murder the president or to take a more obvious example from higher ed,

i couldn't say to a student i like the sweater you're wearing and if you wear it again on tuesday i will give you an a, right? is that a limit on my speech? of course it is and by the way, one that i'm very happy to accept. most forms of sexual harassment are verbal and they are illegal. so obviously there are limits on things that we can say, but i think it's really important to go back to tinker and the school case that if an institution, especially a public institution, wants to limit speech, the burden should be on that institution to show why it's absolutely necessary to do so, and that's what tinker said, by the way. tinker did not say that the kids can say whatever they want at all times, right? a kid can't stand up in the middle of math class and start calling their teacher a racial or sexual slur. right? >> true. >> tinker did not say you can say whatever you want. what tinker said is that if the school wants to restrain you,

the school has to show that what you are saying created a material and substantial disruption to learning. so that's a really good example for me about a kind of, i think, very reasonable limit. again, we can argue and discuss about where those limits should be and none of this is easy, right? a kid wearing the part of the bible that some people and i said some people, think inter diets homosexuality or gave behavior, should they be able to wear that passage in school? will that disrupt somebody's learning? there are hard calls in there but the larger point is that the burden has to be on the institution not on the speaker to show that this is such a risk that you can't say it in this environment. >> you also alluded, john, to the fact that all of us as professionals and as human beings engage in appropriate

self-sensor ship, right, because because we have the right to say something doesn't mean that we always say it and in that theme, signe, i wanted to ask you if you have any constraints, self- people that you would not include in your cartoons. and here i'll quote something that was often said by the detractors of the danish cartoons, including people that i used to think of as supporting free speech saying, oh, those cartoons were punching down and it's not fair or appropriate to punch down. >> well, first of all, it was at a time when people were being beheaded and burned in cages.

there was fairly dramatic behavior that i think people were repelled by that was done by, in the name of the muslim religion. and i don't think that was, you know, by any means should be taken as the whole, the whole religion. but it was part of what was happening in the history of the time. yeah, there are things that i didn't do and making fun, gratuitously making fun of any religion was one of them. i wouldn't just go out and do a cartoon about muslim or a catholic or anybody else. and i also, the first cartoon that i showed for martin luther,

i worked for a family newspaper. i didn't do nudity, i didn't do sex. there were informal standards. and the reason i didn't do them would be that they would detract from the point of the cartoon. people would just get upset that there was nudity and likewise, i wouldn't include a religious figure gratuitously if it wasn't, if it wasn't [ inaudible ] something that had to do. it just, you know, i didn't go around picking on cripples. >> right, right. >> i would add, anybody who knows signe wilkinson or any of her work over the past four decades, they'll see she doesn't do any of this gratuitously.

she's not trying to offense anybody. but sometimes she will, right? just by virtue of the fact that she's dealing with important and emotional, political, and cultural questions. and i think the real question for all of us is, when people are upset, do you concede to that? and also, i would add in the case of the muslim cartoons, do you concede to their bullying and violent threats? for me as an american, the best analogy to this dispute, there is a really interesting juncture in the 1960s where there's a civil rights demonstration and peter, paul and mary, and harry bell fonte are there. at one point, harry bellefonte gives a key to mary of peter, paul and mary. immediately in the southern parts of the united states, the networks cut away. why? they said people will be upset.

white people in the south will be upset at the idea of a black person and a white person kissing. were they correct. in? they were. and there were plenty of people who were upset but that's my point. are you going to concede to people's bigotry? and that's what they did and that is what was recommend rehencible. they weren't wrong about the upset. they were exactly right. >> well put. here's another question i think for you, signe. do you feel memes are the new cartooning? >> good question. yes. i think they are. this democratized political cartooning. what they lack is drawing. but they do the same thing. they make immediate and pointed and funny remarks about almost instantaneously.

i mean, much faster than i could draw a cartoon even if i was drawing the image that the meme had. and the other reason that they're so ubiquitous is obviously, they're using today's medium. i draw, my history withdrawing pen on paper and it was printed on paper. that is over, over, over, even though i just don't think that editorial cartoons, the traditional ones have the same impact as they do when you open a page and see it on your table in front of you. and memes, well, they stick around because paper sticks around. where a meme is gone and then there's another one, or a funny tweet. that's why people love them.

they really, they're like, they're refreshing during the day to take your mind off stuff. and make you laugh. and make you think. so yeah. i regretfully can see that memes are, you know, they have their place in political discussion. >> okay. next audience question. why is free speech under threat in america? i thought the first amendment protected it. professor? >> it's always under threat. and that's really the theme of the book. so we have these four chapters where we say free speech allows to you criticize your leaders and allows minority to challenge their oppression and it allows you to consume the literature and the film you like and it allows students and teachers to speak in school. but it is allows because all of

these have been observed in the breach. i should allow it. right? of course it should but it never really has. america is a work in progress. it is always incomplete. and as delighted as i am to be doing this panel, quote, at the national archives. we're not at the national archives. we're on zoom. if we were at the national archives, we would be in the presence of those documents. and the reason i think we worship those documents is not because we've attained the ideals in them. it is rather because we're struggling to do that. we are imperfect like all human beings. we move in fits and starts. we're blinded and blinkered and imperfected and that's precisely why we need to study the history

and we have to continue the struggle. because ironically, we're never actually going to get there. >> if i can put on my common law professor hat, and also my aclu leader hat, no portion of the constitution including the bill of rights, including the first amendment, is self-enforcing. for most of our nation's history, all of these wonderful promises of liberty lay around completely unfulfilled and constantly in practice. which is why the aclu was formed more than a century ago, the naacp before that. and even when you win a case in the supreme court that enforces the first amendment such as the tinker case, that doesn't automatically mean every school teacher in every school district around the country even knows about it, let alone is actually enforcing it. >> i should tell you my students, including some extremely well informed student

are often shocked to discover that the vietnam war was really the first national conflict we had where the courts consistently upheld the rights of people to protest it. and that was in my lifetime. appearances notwithstanding, i'm not that old. all of this is really recent and that's precisely why we got to be so protective of it. so during the vietnam war, a guy named cohen, he walks into a post office wearing a -- >> he was a college student. >> a college student, yeah, a college student saying f the draft. and he was arrested. and ultimately, the courts said that he could in fact wear that jacket. but by that time, i'm in middle school. i mean, it's not that long ago. and there were other cases where people were arrested for wearing an american flag as an anti-war protest thing. people arrested for playing in

which people made fun of soldiers. this is all during the vietnam era. the fact that they were arrested shows that plenty of people in authority still believed that you didn't have the right to criticize the war. so if you've ever been to an anti-war protest, thank cohen, you know? and thank the other people that laid down the line. sometimes their lives so that you had the right to say what's on your mind. >> what i find extraordinary is the number of young people, mary beth tinker being a classic example, who come to the aclu and other organizations and stand up, first, stand up for their rights. that means they have to defy teachers and principals and i remember one case, the aclu won recently for a student who refused to salute the american flag. she was an african-american student in connecticut. and she said i don't want to. because i don't believe that we

have liberty and justice for all. we have too much racism in this country. and she was actually punished which is not only violating the first amendment but also a very old supreme court decision enforcing it. and we had to go to court ultimately, of course, we won. and i will never forget the judge lectured the school. he said you're supposed to be teaching her about civics. not the other way around. so one of the messages to the young people who i hope will all read your book, they are never too young to know about their rights, to stand up for them. they can accomplish a lot on their own. they have a lot of allies including the aclu. >> can i just share my screen to illustrate that last point? >> please. just to illustrate the last

point. that's from my book. that's colin kaepernick. you don't have to just stand up for your rights. you can kneel for them as well. >> and it does take a lot of courage as we said to stand up against authority. in today's cancel culture climate, i think students tend to be more afraid of their peers than authority figures. >> definitely. and there's a big, big survey now showing, i know nadine, you're on the board. they sponsored this incredibly extensive survey of college students and found college students of every political party, every race, they're censoring themselves. not because they're afraid of me because i'm old. but they're afraid of their peers. and the pure effect is extremely strong especially when you're young. when i was 18, i really did care a lot about what other 18-year-olds thought.

but i think that's another reason why the people that run these institutions really have to stand up and raise their voices about what a problem that is. and i haven't heard enough of that. so after the fire report, i wanted to see a bunch of university presidents to say, look, this is bad. what is bad specifically? it is bad that tens of thousands of young people report that they're not saying what they think for fear of being canceled. all right? that's bad. our job is to educate. that dynamic is uneducational. it inhibits what we can learn from each other. >> sorry. we have two minutes left. i would like to give, john, you were in the middle of a closing statement or could have been. if you can finish that and then i'll give signe the same opportunity. >> one of my heroes and arguably the most important jurist not on

the supreme court. he said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit that's not too sure of itself. and i think right now, too many of us are too sure of ourselves. and that's why we're trying to stamp out speech. because we know what is right. but actually, we don't. and the other thing that was said in the same speech is that, unless liberty lives in the heart of american men and women, he said women, too, sort of cool in 1944 -- >> i agree. >> that no constitution or law will protect it. this isn't just a matter of law. this is a matter of culture and a matter of all of us deciding what sort of society we want to live in. and we've got to protect liberty. if we don't, no politician is going to. >> thank you. signe? >> well, he speaks my mind and we are out of time. so i want to thank everyone for

tuning in. go look at them damn pictures and don't be afraid of them. one of our audience members made a great suggestion which i'm going on use as my closing remark. that this book would be a perfect graduation gift for everybody who is graduating from kindergarten to middle school and law school and college. >> a brilliant, brilliant remark. >> yes. i approve so much. >> thank you all. >> yes. and thanks to nadine being a great moderator and role model. >> thank you. ♪♪

♪♪ this year marks the 20th anniversary of the september 11th attacks. join us for live coverage from new york, the pentagon, and shanksville, pennsylvania, starting at 7:00 a.m. eastern saturday on c-span. watch online at c-span.org or listen on the c-span radio app. in france, freedom of speech is garnl teed under the