If we're talking about free speech, the reason
we need to study history, I think, is to understand
how fortunate we are to have that right and
in how many different times and places it's
been contested and restricted and denied.
One of the things you'll learn when you read
history is that actually, the Vietnam War
was the first war that Americans had the right
to criticize.
And it became a Supreme Court case called
Cohen v. California.
And in Cohen v. California, a guy walked into
a draft board wearing a jacket that said "F
the draft."
And he was arrested.
And the only reason you can walk around now
wearing a jacket that says "F the draft" or
"F the war in Iraq" or "F the president" is
because of Cohen.
If you don't know that history, you don't
know how precious this freedom is.
No freedom is absolute or should be, right?
You can't call the White House and say you
want to assassinate the president, right?
I'm a university professor, and I can't say
to a student, 'I really like the sweater you're
wearing.
And if you wear it on Thursday, I'll give
you an A', all right?
That's, if you want a restriction of my freedom,
by the way, it's one that I'm happy to abide
by.
It's just a gratuitous example of how there's
all sorts of speech that we do not allow and
should not allow.
But we also don't have to reinvent the wheel.
There's 100 years of case law and constitutional
discussion about this very question.
Who should be able to talk?
And when is their talk, their speech so intolerant
and so awful that we can't allow it?
And so it seems to me the other thing that
we should be teaching in schools is precisely
that history -- that is, the history of the
debate surrounding who gets to talk.
So every American should know about Oliver
Wendell Holmes' famous dictum, freedom of
speech doesn't include shouting "fire" in
a crowded theater.
But they should also know that in that case,
Oliver Wendell Holmes actually upheld the
censorship of somebody that wanted to distribute
anti-conscription, anti-draft leaflets.
Because he said there was a war going on,
the First World War, and he believed that
distributing anti-draft literature during
the war was the equivalent of shouting "fire"
in a crowded theater.
Now, the doctrine has evolved since then,
right?
And now, during the Iraq and Afghanistan war,
you were perfectly free to distribute pamphlets
saying you didn't think there should be a
draft.
So our standards of what's acceptable and
our standards of what should be tolerated
have changed over time.
And I think that everybody should know about
those changes.
I think that's part of becoming a citizen.
I am a liberal Democrat.
In fact, I'm almost a caricature of a liberal
democrat.
My father was in the Peace Corps.
I was in the Peace Corps.
I'm Jewish.
I have a PhD.
I'm like a cartoon, alright?
But part of my liberalism is an absolute commitment
to free speech.
And one of the things I find most upsetting,
both at the partisan and at the intellectual
level, is the way that free speech has now
been cast as a kind of conservative value.
I find this profoundly ahistorical, because
all of the great warriors for social justice
in the past, with names like Frederick Douglass
and W.E.B.
Du Bois and Martin Luther King, they were
absolutists on free speech.
Because they understood that it was the people
at the bottom that needed free speech the
most, because it was all they had.
So I had a really interesting experience that,
for me, kind of crystallized this change and
why it's so important.
I've hosted Mary Beth Tinker in my class at
Penn.
Mary Beth Tinker was in middle school when
she and other family members wore these black
armbands to school in Des Moines to protest
the Vietnam War.
They were sent home from school, and this
eventually became a very important test case
called Tinker v. Des Moines.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court in Tinker v.
Des Moines upheld their right to do that.
And it was in that case that Justice Fortas
very famously wrote that students and teachers
don't shed their constitutional rights at
the schoolhouse gate.
Well, Mary Beth Tinker is now a 65-year-old
person.
And she came to my class to talk about this
case and free speech.
And the students said to her, they said, "Listen,
Miss Tinker, you were fighting the good fight.
You were fighting the Vietnam War.
Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter and Ben
Shapiro, they're not fighting the good fight.
They're just hurting people.
They're anti-trans.
They're anti-gay.
They're anti-black.
They are just haters.
They injure people.
Why should they have the privilege of speaking?"
Mary Beth Tinker wasn't having it.
Here's what she said.
She said, "Listen in the school that I attended
in Des Moine, there were kids who had fathers
and brothers that were dying in Southeast
Asia.
Do you think they weren't hurt by this snot-nosed
kid wearing this symbol saying that their
dad or brother was dying for a lie?
You don't think that hurt them?
Wake up!
It hurt them.
Speech hurts.
But if that's going to be your rubric, if
that's going to be your definition, forget
my armband, because I was hurting people too."
Then they went on to say, "Well, look, this
free speech thing, this is just an abstraction.
It's not really about rights.
It's just about power, who has power, who
has the power to talk."
She's not having that either.
She says, "Listen, I was a 13-year-old kid.
The only power I had was my speech.
That was it.
And speech, over time, has been a weapon of
the powerless.
If you go ahead and censor it, eventually
it's going to be turned against the people
with the least power, and it may be turned
against you."
