 So, when the ACLU of Virginia decided that they were going to take this case, which is actually a pretty straightforward free speech case, I mean, I think the neo-Nazis got the permit first, and then the freedom-loving people got the permit second, and then when they realized there might be violence, they tried to take one permit away. But it's a first come first serve when you have a neutral application. What's different in what's changed in ACLU policy is that they were armed, because the neo-Nazis and Skokie were not armed, right, but they were armed down in Charlottesville. And I think it really raises an interesting question about Second Amendment and First Amendment rights in conflict, right, because when you're carrying a gun, it's going to intimidate me. It's my free speech. It's going to be chilled, you know, it may well be. Welcome to Coolidge Corner Theater. I'm Alex Schaffner, Events Director at Proclime Booksmith. Please everyone join me in welcoming Hyellet Waldman, Michael Sheban, and Carol Rose. Let's start by telling you a little bit about how this book was born. And then we'll talk a little bit about the ACLU. We'll talk about some of the challenges facing us all. We'll talk about some of the specific essays. Michael will read for a bit, and then we'll take your questions. So there's our roadmap for tonight. So this essay collection began on the night of the election. Basically, we, like I imagine many of you, were staring at the television horrified. I will say I was not surprised, but others were surprised. I know at one point my daughter sent me a text and she said, Daddy says everything's going to be okay. And I texted back and I said, Daddy is delusional. So the following day, I got in touch with a friend of mine, James Essex, who works with the ACLU in New York City on the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project. And I said, James, if you ever need a couple of novelists to do whatever you're going to need to do over the next four day years to 20 to 30, we are here. Tell us what you need us to do. And I assumed that he would say, yeah, thanks. But he immediately got in touch with me and he said, we know what we want you to do. And Michael and I had done, our first anthology that we had done together was a book called Kingdom of Olives and Ash, in which we brought a couple of dozen novelists primarily from all over the world. Everyone from Mario Vargas Llosa to Jacqueline Woodson to Geraldine Brooks. To the West Bank in Gaza. And we had them write essays about what they saw and experienced. And we collected those essays in a book. And so James said, we want you to do that for the ACLU. So I thought for a minute, and I said, I have a great idea. He pointed out that the centennial was happening this year. The ACLU celebrates its 100th year. And we decided that what we would do is we would approach every writer we knew and ask them if they wanted to take one of the seminal ACLU cases over the last hundred years and write an essay inspired by it. Not a op-ed piece really, not a law review article. Just a personal essay inspired by one of these cases. And we figured if we worked hard, we'd get a dozen people together. And we might be able to publish this book. But in the end, every single person said yes. And only one of those people who said yes dropped out. Call some writer. But people were so eager to get involved to do something. There was this feeling like, what can I do? I have to do something. How do I personally resist? And if you're a literary novelist, the direction of your resistance is not necessarily obvious. So people really wanted to feel like they were doing something. And astonishingly, the publisher, Simon & Schuster, gave us a nice advance, donating it directly to the ACLU, $100,000, which is incredible for a publisher, right? Let's hear it for Simon & Schuster. I mean, John Legend, and what's her name? Oh, well, why don't you? They can, they can, Chrissy Teigen, they can do in like one minute on Twitter 25 times that, but still. Apparently they raised a million dollars for the ACLU on Twitter in an hour or something. So it's not that. We do what we can. We worked for a year and we edited. But nobody got paid for this. None of the writers got paid. But all of the money is going to the ACLU, which is amazing. And you're going to hear a pitch from me at the end that will encourage you to walk across the street. So Carol, why don't we start off? Let's talk a little bit about just how this organization was born, what its genesis was. Hey, wonderful. Well, thank you all for being here and thank you for inviting me to be with the two of you tonight. This book, I just have to say, is a fabulous reading. If you are fighting the winter blues or just political despair, let me just encourage you to get the book because it's just a wonderful read. And it's the kind of book that you can go back to time and again. And it's a great way to think about these cases and to really think about the personal stories that the authors write. And the best thing, and I was saying before, is that it makes me want to go read all these authors. And so it'll open up your your doorways, not only to the ACLU and things about the ACLU in these great cases, but about the potential authors you could go out and read for those of you who haven't read all of them yet. Some of them I have read, but many of them I haven't and now I plan to. So it's a really great read and so I'm particularly happy to be here. We're glad to have you. So the ACLU and the ACLU of Massachusetts are sharing a birthday because we're the oldest ACLU affiliate in the country. I'm proud to say many good things started in many good revolutions started in Massachusetts. And it started in the home of a woman named Margaret Shercliff on Beacon Hill, who lived on Beacon Hill. And she pulled people together because they were really upset about a couple of things going on. There had been the Palmer raids. A Mitchell Palmer was the attorney general and they had decided to go and round up immigrants and deport them into demonized immigrants. What? That's outrageous. Sounds really familiar. And also to prevent people from speaking on the Boston Common, including women who wanted to talk about contraception. And so it was these issues that come around again and again and again. And while we've made so much progress in the last 100 years, the rights and liberties that we all too often take for granted, in fact, are hard won and we have to keep fighting to keep them. And we've really seen that in the last three years with this administration that we cannot take for granted that the rights that we assume are ours will remain ours absent of fight and of resistance. So that's what the ACLU started to do, started out to do, and that's what the ACLU continues to do today. So one of the very early cases was this case that, you know, what we did is we basically, we assembled a timeline of cases and we sent them out to the writers and we said, just pick a case, first come, first served. So for example, Alexander Ham on a marvelous, marvelous novelist from Sarajevo, right? He's married to a woman who's African American and so he chose to write about loving versus Virginia. And Andrew Sean Greer, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and who's gay, chose to write about Windsor, which is the case that the Supreme Court case that established the right to gay marriage for who knows how long. And Michael, why don't you tell us why you chose your case and then read a little bit of it, of your essay? Well, I mean, I'll just say first of all, I think one of the things that's cool about the book and the pieces in the book is that some of them are very personal and talk about how the case, the ruling in the case that the ACLU argued in is directly, has had a direct impact on their lives in some way and so some of them are pretty intensely personal and others tend to take a more kind of narrative approach to the case itself and that approach appealed to me initially and then somebody reminded us, I think, about Morris Ernst, this lawyer, this great First Amendment lawyer, maybe one of the greatest First Amendment lawyers who ever lived and who was an early member. It's been misreported a little bit. Sometimes it said he was a founder of the ACLU. Maybe he was not exactly a founder, but he was one of the earliest members of the ACLU. In any case, he had been involved, I knew, in the famous Ulysses decision, the obscenity decision that allowed Ulysses James Joyce's great novel to be published and sold legally in the United States and so as soon as I learned of that connection, I thought, okay, I want to tell that story. Just as an aside, the reason Michael is obsessed with James Joyce and in fact, when one of our sons was in kindergarten, he wrote one of those poems, I don't know if you have kids where they ask, they have the kids write about their parents in poetry form and they give them prompts. So one of the prompts was what is daddy doing and what is daddy doing was reading. Said something like daddy is, and then there are things, daddy is this, daddy is that, and then it said daddy is reading Finnegan's Wake. Because Michael had been reading it for his entire life. Our kids, not mine. His entire cognitively aware years because he read it, he read it through and then he read it again right after that. So as far as Abe knew, that's just what his dad did. Yeah, that was my job. So yeah, I mean, it was a topic, it was something I'd always been interested in and I knew it I think best like a lot of people who've taken a look at Ulysses and even if you've never gotten very far in Ulysses, you don't have to get very far at all to get the Woolsey decision because up until sometime in I think the early 90s, every edition of Ulysses published in the United States included right up front the actual written decision by the judge, Judge Woolsey in the case and it's a really beautiful piece of prose writing in its own right. It's about two pages long and or three pages and every time I read Ulysses, I read the decision first because there it is and also I remember from the last time I read it that I enjoyed it. So I had this regard for Judge Woolsey in particular and I'm going to read you just the last couple two pages of my piece and it's no spoilers, you know, the judge ruled correctly and the book was published and has been legal ever since. Ulysses is one of my favorite books. I adore it and like generations of the books admirers from the day Judge Woolsey issued his elegantly written ruling that Ulysses was not obscene and therefore could legally be admitted to and soon after published in the United States a decision afterward upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. I've always been grateful to the judge for his sagacity, his principled reasoning, and his evident good taste in books. Every time I sit down to reread Ulysses I begin with Judge Woolsey's ruling included right up front in every U.S. edition of the novel until the mid-1980s and every time say a silent thank you to that wise jurist for his integral role in bringing Ulysses to American readers like me. Having looked into the story of the United States versus Ulysses however I now see that my gratitude has been somewhat misplaced. With no disrespect to Judge Woolsey whose charming acknowledgement that the book does have its dirty parts quote this is a quote from the judge his ruling it must always be remembered that Joyce's locale was Celtic and his season spring makes me smile every time we owe the Ulysses decision less to the judge in the case than to counsel for the defense what an incredible feat of lawyering Morris Ernst exercised every bit of craft persuasion and influence he could bring to bear from intervening in the writing of the tariff act to buttressing the case with plaudits from high brow critics and small town librarians to manipulating the court calendar and playing on the sympathy of his opposing counsel even the inclusion of Woolsey's ruling at the head of the edition Random House published in 1934 was a legal strategy conceived by Ernst as a hedge against future attempts to prosecute the book knowing Woolsey understanding both his sensitivity and discernment and his literary interests Ernst played him like a violin by presenting Ulysses packaging it might be a more accurate characterization and a dense apparatus of erudite debate and critical theorizing Ernst had not just made it impossible for the judge to avoid considering an alleged dirty book as a work of literature he had also issued a subtle challenge to Woolsey's a more prop as a literary man the moment Woolsey accepted the book status as literature Ernst had the judge where he wanted him by definition a work of literature could not be obscene could not be pornographic could not corrupt and depraved could never be intended to arouse a reader even if certain passages instead worked out with sexual activity and bodily functions in plain even vulgar terms otherwise a reader like Judge Woolsey and those two mysterious friends mentioned in the ruling in fact fellow members of the Century Club whose opinions as literary assessors he said he had sought would be forced to acknowledge having found edification and truth and beauty in a pornographic book or else sexual arousal in a masterpiece both of which conclusions Ernst encouraged Woolsey to find were absurd though at least one subsequent reader crawling into the lascivious thoughts and the warm bed of soft round fragrant molly bloom at the novel's end has found the line less bright between edification and arousal and we celebrate the American civil liberties union that Morris Ernst helped to found we tend rightly I'm sure to focus on injustices confronted rights upheld principles established victims vindicated we revel in the constitution in the Bill of Rights thrill or shudder or shake our heads at the crimes the outrages the victories and defeats the history of the ACLU is a history of great struggle bitter and glorious but it is also it is first of all a history of great lawyers like Morris Ernst who brought as much artistry and erudition and sly masterful skill to defending one book called Ulysses as its author had brought to its creation so Michael when you were doing this research you found out something really amazing about how the the case began so when I thought about this or one of the very earliest cases I assumed that the customs some customs official had opened up a box and found all these copies of Ulysses and was so horrified that he he immediately sees them but tell us a little bit about how that actually came to be well yeah no it is a such a weird story it's such a there are so many surprising turns I hadn't known about um I kind of had the same general impression and it turns out that Ulysses had been in various forms had been smuggled into the United States for a very long time and um that was something you actually did if you were going to Paris and you were of certain kind of you know inclination and taste and means you would go to Shakespeare and Company bookstore which is the publisher of Ulysses and you would buy some copies and bring them home in your steamer trunk you know and smuggle them in and so that when but no U.S. publisher up until Random House wanted to take on the challenge of of what might happen to them if they actually published the book until finally Bennett Cerf had both both the courage and the appetite for money because he he he calculated correctly if anyone ever did and other publishers had had the same thought like if we ever do publish Ulysses we're going to sell a million of them before they've shut us down and arrest us because everybody not the rep its reputation as a dirty book had been enhanced by the fact that it had been banned for so long and that so few people had read it so um when they finally kind of got all their pieces in place and as you heard and I try to tell the story and these Morris Ernst had just it was like a Rube Goldberg contraption and he just set everything perfectly and all the dominoes fell exactly how he had hoped they would except in this one place where they were one of the places they ran into trouble was they have they hired a confederate someone who was going to Paris and he bought a copy of the book and he brought it back in his luggage and he got off it the um the uh steamship dock in Brooklyn and the uh uh you know he was put his thing his bags to be searched and the customs agent um like picked up the book put it back in locked the case and sent him on his way and they didn't seize it and the guy was really confused he had been sort of prepped to expect possibly even to be detained or questioned or something like that and he just showed up at the random house office like here's your book you wanted and they and you know and Morris Ernst was horrified and outraged and and he's like you know I'm gonna march right down and make those idiots do their job for them and he went down and he like started just button-holing various customs agents trying to get somebody to actually you know arrest him or something just seize the book so that they could actually start the legal proceedings and one of the customs agents like oh yeah now we see that all the time and I mean so fine he finally somehow prevailed on someone to actually do their job and seize the book um I they had taped all of these reviews as you heard mentioned like he literally packaged the book in positive reviews and essays by famous writers and so on and they were sort of taped in and he got the one of the customs guys to notice that like look at this don't you think this could be somehow anarchist in some way that we have all these sort of these manifestos have been stuck in here and then at that point the guy said okay we'll seize it so Carol that makes me ask a question sort of in terms general terms how often when you know because the ACLU you do impact litigation you're looking to have not have an effect not on an individual defendant or an individual plaintiff you're looking to have an effect on a larger issue so how often are the cases that come to you cases that come to you and how often are the cases that you search out say looking for the ideal defendant or plaintiff right well so that's a great question because we do do impact litigation as well as other things we also have a field program and a legislative program so we do what we call integrated advocacy and so the interplay between the field program and the legal program is incredibly important because our field people are out doing know your rights trainings in communities that are particularly impacted and working coalition with people so we often hear about cases so we may have a legal theory that we're looking to test to do law reform but we have connections in communities where people are most affected by oppression and we're able to work with them and to help them find their own voice in their own agency and they'll often come to us and say oh well if you're looking for that I know my friend or my family member or whatever so a lot of times it's this interplay between our field work in the community combined with the litigation work so it's not just you know waiting for the phone call to come in over the transit right can you think of a specific case that in your experience where there was something that you guys really wanted to work on and you were say soliciting people who could or not necessarily soliciting but looking for defendants who could say exemplify the situation that you wanted to sure I mean I think the most relevant right now has to do with what's going on with immigration so there've been any number of cases that we've had everybody's heard about the separation of families at the border the ACLU nationwide is already reunified more almost 6 000 children with their parents nationwide yeah it's amazing work but now they're pushing the people over across the border because the ACLU was litigating about the conditions they were putting children and other people into ice boxes so to speak really cold places and holding them so the Trump administration didn't want to have these lawsuits coming so they're actually pushing them back across the bridge and one of these places at Nuevo Laredo bridge across from Brownsville Texas and into a town called Tama Lipis and in Tama Lipis it's so dangerous that the State Department has actually declared it a level four of dangerousness for as a travel advisory meaning it's like Syria or Afghanistan and so there are about 60 000 people who've been pushed back across the border who are living in these encampments and they're being preyed upon by gangs who kidnap them for ransom and rape them and rob them and otherwise it's incredibly incredibly dangerous and in fact custom and border patrol agents aren't allowed to go out at night because it's too dangerous for them but not too dangerous for these children and the families so we've been working for a really long time the ACLU and we every state affiliate is independent but we're confederated so when you become an ACLU member you're a member of the ACLU of Massachusetts and the national ACLU automatically and we share money in fact we send money out to places like Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia where the need is great and the resources are small so it's this wonderful kind of confederated network that we have of ACLU affiliates so we've been talking throughout the nation about trying to find ways to challenge this return to Mexico policy and so recently we got a call from and again because we go out we are active in effective communities we got a call from a pastor of a woman and her two daughters three and five who had recently come across the border and had made it to some other family members in Ashland they were from Guatemala and they had been targeted because the husband had seen a murder and so he was given a death threat and in fact shot and so they decided they needed to leave he survived the shooting so they came across and Maudi and the two girls came across the Tama Lipis bridge last July and three days later this return to Mexico policy went in and Hans and his son Hansito who was eight came across later and the reason they came across separately is that's a tactic because if the dad and the mom and the three kids came across they would take the dad away and so they were trying to make sure the whole family got across the border but Hans and Hansito were not allowed across the border and they presented themselves legally for asylum these are asylum seekers right from death threats and so Maudi and the two girls made it to Massachusetts and Hans and Hansito were forced back across the bridge there was an attempted kidnapping they went into hiding actually in a basement of somebody over there where they had been in hiding for seven months so when we were working through the churches and working community and they heard about this they said oh my gosh that's what happened to Maudi why don't you go talk to her so we went to talk to her and we were able to bring a claim on behalf of Maudi because you have to have a person in the US the reason the Trump administration has done this you can't get jurisdiction when they're over there we were able to bring a lawsuit and I'm really pleased to say that last Thursday Hans and Hansito arrived to Loken Airport yeah and so we had this amazing reunion it was just amazing and amazingly remarkable and what was among the many things that were great about this I mean mostly that we got this family reunified but a lot of immigration lawyers showed up the word suddenly got out and all these people who weren't in the case showed up like people who were doing the day in and day out immigration work not impact litigation and I was like what are they doing here and one of them said to me oh we lose day in and day out let us come when we win let us be a part of this and I was like open up the doors let me know yeah absolutely um and so that's and you know my response was like isn't this great now you know there's 60,000 people that's you know 59,999 to go um so our work continues it's not like we're done but we we've the cases arise that way because we have a really wonderful network of affiliates across the country where we talk to each other we work together and we have this integrated advocacy where the lawyers are working with the field people together to try to craft a broader approach than what we've traditionally had you know just going we can't just go to the courts and we're going to win anymore it has to be a large movement which is why all of you and the writers here are so important to this because each of us has a role to play in this resistance it's not you know the lawyers alone are not going to fix the problems that we're facing and the threats to civil rights and civil liberties it requires the artists the teachers the neighbors the doctors all of us have to play a role in doing this and when we work together we actually do win um but it requires all of us and that's why this book is so important to me and so speaks to me so so strongly oh thank you so much car that's that i'm i've now managed to gather myself i was tearing up before um one of the things you know to that end i just the thing one of the things the experiences of of doing the book that was so amazing was people started handing in taking their cases and then handing in their essays and then scott to row um i'm searching through the text to find out the name of his essay scott to row called me and he said you're not gonna like this and i was like what am i not gonna like he said i'm writing about buckley versus vileo and i think the aclu is wrong so i said go for it go ahead write about buckley versus vileo and um i called up anthony merrow the head of the aclu and i said i just want to give you a heads up and he's that one of the essays in this book celebrating your centennial is going to say that you made a mistake and he said awesome that's this is a book about the aclu that's the point um so uh scott's scott's essay about buckley versus vileo talks about um that that first case and then what ultimately led to citizens united and the notion that um that uh in a nutshell that that corporate speech is speech and that it qualifies for protection under the first amendment and i wonder kyle if you could talk to us a little bit about the aclu's position on that and why the aclu took the position it did and you know if there if you're willing to talk about any internal uh debate that there might have been right uh nothing the aclu likes more than defending the right of people to attack the aclu right we love it um no but seriously um there's there is actually a joke that says if you just if you agree with the aclu 75 of the time you're probably an aclu member if you agree with the aclu 50 of the time you're a board member which is actually true so the whole question of campaign finance you know speech is is money speech or corporations people um that has been debated more than any other topic in the history of the aclu i think there have been 27 national board votes this is a national board issue um over the years and they're they basically are kind of don't have a position so in citizens united the only position the aclu took on amicus was actually just to challenge the part of the law that said you cannot say a candidate's name in an issue ad for 60 days before an election in other words you can't use actual speech to say a candidate's name for 60 days before an election and they challenged that because the organization was so uh riven uh about what to do about it and so that's where they ended up and so everybody goes the aclu did citizens united i'm like uh not actually um that noted um there are many of us um who think that the decision was a wrong decision by the supreme court i think it's possible to say that in fact speech is implicated and we're going to regulate it we do regulate speech you know hostile work environment is a regulation of speech obscenity is a regulation of speech uh hostile learning environment is a regulation of speech so we regulate speech all the time you're not allowed to put up a political poster in a voting place right in a polling place um so the notion that we can't say that that that there is a that money is used to fund speeches is it just is that doesn't mean we can't regulate it and i think the court did the wrong thing by refusing to regulate it because i think there's a competing state interest in fair elections um that gets us there that noted that is what the court ruled so what do we do now and that's where i would like to sort of pause for a moment because um there are a lot of things that we can and should be doing now going to back to the um public financing for elections we should be working on fair equal time rules on for through the FCC so there's a lot of steps that we can take to actually regulate more of the money in speech um and i think we should take those steps the thing i don't think we should do is push for a big constitutional convention because when you have a constitutional convention to open up and renegotiate the first amendment given who's in power right now i'm not sure we're going to get a result that we're going to be very happy with my guess is in general when you do that the people who have the power are going to get more power and the people who don't have the power are going to have less power um so i just would put that out there is like the the critique of what's wrong with it is one thing but it's a little like marxism great critique of capitalism not necessarily the best alternative and i think we need to be mindful of distinguishing between the critique and the alternative as we talk about the role of money in politics and then the last thing i'll say we've brought a series of cases one up to the supreme court one in main and two in massachusetts one was out of uh lol and the other was out of wuster having to do with the right of poor people to beg and it turned out interestingly citizens united was quite important in that case because there are these anti panhandling ordinances because the you know the businesses don't like to have poor people asking for money and uh and one of the lines we're able to say is if it's true that the court says that money is speech then certainly a person's using offshore words to say brother can you spare a dime cannot be unconstitutional um and so you know we're working within the current jurisprudence of that um i think it can and i think it will change but in the meantime i think it's about finding ways in the courts to bring other cases that begin to chip away at the worst impact while moving into the regulatory framework through the FCC to get some regulations to try to make sure uh that it doesn't dominate and the last thing i would just say is um you know i think and i think the real pernicious part of money in politics isn't just in elections i think it's throughout as we're seeing now with the current kleptocracy that we have but i think if you look at people like Liz Warren and bernie sanders and others you're seeing that there are ways to rise up and to do small crowd sourcing as a way to still make yourself relevant as a politician so that also gives me hope that despite an opinion that i personally may not agree with there are uh leaders who are rising up and people behind them who are rising up to try to overcome the bad decision by the court that's great um so one of the you know when i was trying to think when we were putting this book together what the first time i ever heard of the aclu my parents were members for as long as i and yours yours too right michael um but the first aclu case i ever heard of or situation i have heard of was skokie and it was nazis marching in skokie and um a predominantly jewish suburb of chicago exactly and i remember i mean how many of you remember that from and so that's really this notion of and that's how i learned about free speech because it seemed to me incomprehensible as a little girl that it would be oh that it was you know things were either good or bad right that it could be good for nazis to be allowed to march and surely the good guys would be saying that the nazis can't march and when my parents um when my father specifically explained to me what free speech meant and why and there was that old you know uh i may not agree with you but i will defend to the end of my life your right to say blah blah blah however that goes um that it was very difficult for a child to understand but once i understood it i feel like it shaped everything i think about the united states constitution it was the same for me too like that was the moment when i first understood how hard democracy is like that it comes up against these things that common sense would seem to say are wrong but there's a deeper more important principle at work that can be very hard to understand sometimes absolutely and there's a great essay by a young novelist named moriel rothman zecher in the book it's called on jews blacks the kkk ohio and freedom of speech and he's um one of the one of the terrific writers in the book one of the lesser known writers but he was just named one of the five national book associations five under 35 novelists to watch and this is one of my very favorite essays in the book but i wanted to ask you so um things what is is there a difference or or what is the difference if there is one between what was happening in skokie back then and what happened in charlottesville or as or we're seeing now like is there do you see a distinction between those two movements and the the the the the the kinds of protests and and what is what has the what's the acu's approach has it changed is it the same that kind of thing yeah i mean our approach has changed and the world has changed um so i think that the i mean i think one of the wrong lessons of skokie that some people got was oh if it's an unpopular client it must be righteous well not necessarily true um so when the acu of virginia decided that they were going to take this case which is actually a pretty straightforward free speech case i mean i think the neo nazis got the permit first and then the freedom loving people got the permit second and then when they realized there might be violence they tried to take one permit away but it's a first come first serve when you have a neutral application what's different and what was i think and what's changed in acu policy is that they were armed because the neo nazis and skokie were not armed right um but they were armed down in charlottesville and i think it really raises an interesting question about second amendment and first amendment rights in conflict right because when you're carrying a gun is going to intimidate me it's my free speech going to be chilled you know it may well be and so a week later i don't know if you all remember they came to boston to the boston common and uh i was like wow so we had all these requests for representation um we had requests by neo nazis to represent them and then we had requests by the trotskyites and the malice it was awesome like who knew it was great back we go to the beginning of the last exactly um and i was i was like wow how do we how do we navigate this right because each affiliate we make our own decisions and i was given kind of a lifeline i have to say by the then boston police commissioner billy evans who went on camera and said we're not going to let any journalists onto the boston common because we don't want that hateful speech getting out i thought yes get me a journalist so i have a client because i want to represent the first amendment right that's who i want to represent but we do so much racial justice work now that it really feels wrong and conflicting to necessarily i mean we defend words not because they're weak but because they're powerful right and words do have an impact and people with guns marching have an impact so we were able to sort of navigate and be able to bring the same principles forward um but in a different way of doing that and then we also marched with the 70 000 good people of moston in massachusetts who marched against white supremacy uh because we too have free speech rights as an organization and we can raise our voice for what we believe and um anti white supremacy is one of the things the aclu also stands for so we on the same day we were able to do both defending free speech but also defending equal rights and that's the balance that we're always trying to navigate and whenever anybody pits it as one versus the other i'm always trying to look for that center ground because you know i mean the free speech movement arose because dr martin leuther king and stokely car michael and harry bellifonte and these other people needed to have free speech for the civil rights movement right that's where it first arose and now we have the situation where people on the far right would like to own free speech um and i don't i'm not i'm not willing to see that i'm not willing to see that i think we all need to have free speech and because if you begin to see that the power to decide what speech is allowed versus what isn't and you see that to the government then in this government it's going to be going to the powerful and the historically you know people who have power in the privileged it's not going to go to the people whose rights are oppressed or the underprivileged so the defense of free speech is i think we need to defend it in such a way that we enhance equal rights and we enhance the voices of the traditionally oppressed rather than the other way around but on each individual case how we navigate that that's the challenge um and that's the work that we have to do as a society and certainly as the aclu well that seems like a great note to turn it over to questions so um thank you all and alex you'll let me know when it's the last question and so who would like to begin yes right up there thank you um just following up on your point about navigating free speech can you speak a little bit about how the aclu use to use on facebook's position supporting apparently supporting facebook kind of navigating a person member that you were talking to did everybody hear that or do you need me to repeat the question so he's asking yeah he's asking about the aclu's position on whether or not facebook should monitor ads i'm going to be really honest with you i don't know why that is their position so i don't want to pretend or defend it because i don't actually know the answer to that question um i do think that synthetic media or deep fakes um are something that we're going to increasingly need to be confronting um because i think uh things like face recognition which is one of the things we're pushing for a ban on face recognition i'm proud to announce that brookline is one of the first cities that has actually put a ban on the government use of face surveillance technology um the first was actually san francisco because that's where they built it and they know how pernicious and dystopian it is um so i actually have a very deep interest in that and if you want to talk afterwards i'll see if i can get to an answer but i don't want to pretend that i know the answer when i don't thank you next yes so you mentioned the conflict which struck me in terms of the change in um second amendment interpretation from the what like 70 odd years where the supreme court was very clear that it was not a personal right right to that you know incredibly well orchestrated campaign the federal society and such to redefine that that and right you know in which because you know i mean convincing cilia that the constitution was living which you always said it wasn't so what where is the aclu these days on second amendment interpretation and is it a personal right right so where's the aclu on the second amendment and individual gun owner writes i just want to say first of all like the whole dispute that we've had all these years on the second amendment just shows what happens when you have bad writing and bad copy editor so we just had authors and writers doing this stuff we would avoid so many headaches you know so the aclu's position it traditional aclu position the national position and the aclu massachusetts position is that the second amendment gives a right to states to have militias okay and that heller the supreme court decision that said it's an individual right was wrong okay now because we had this confederated cool webby thing that we do at the aclu there are a number of aclu affiliates that have come out on the other side and been in favor of have supported the interpretation of the second amendment places like aclu of texas and aclu of yelming and aclu of navada and it's great because apparently they have some discussions like do you have open carry in your board meetings and i'm like wow my board meetings would be so much more polite you know i'm thinking about changing um so anyway so the aclu of massachusetts it's in the in the national aclu thinks heller is wrong it's not an individual right however i and i i'm i've always personally believe that as well but i'm starting to sort of rethink it a little bit in the following way if in fact heller is i don't want to say they're right but let's it's the law of the land right the fact that there's an individual gun on a right does not mean you cannot regulate it i mean there's a right to travel but it doesn't mean that you don't have to get a license to drive a car you know or get a passport to travel um you know there's there are a lot of rights that we have that are regulated and so perhaps even if i don't again like i don't agree with heller but even if we were to say that heller is what it is so we have to figure out how to go forward through it i still think that there's an opportunity for states to regulate gun ownership even if you say that it's an individual gun on a right in that sense i think you know the inner right just has it wrong it's not a free for all we do you know we say we have free speech we regulate speech all the time so all of these rights that we have the fact that you have a right doesn't mean it's not regulated um maybe and i started thinking about it during the whole legalized marijuana uh debate that we were having here and we kept calling it tax and regulate like if it's legal you can tax and regulate it well you know if it's an individual gun owner right you can tax and regulate it amen yes in the back great question so it's both so uh again we don't i don't work for the national ACLU so my organization my statewide organization goes through its own process and we have um you know a process orientation so we say things like is there a political opportunity uh does it meet all of our goals you know sort of we go through a process of setting goals it was a cute the first time i did priority setting with my staff they came up with 38 um priorities and then they said let's just say to kun just heal the world i was like no that is not priorities though um so we do that but we also the national desert as well and other states do it and then what we do is we have strategy sessions where we talk together and we try to align our strategies because if we can align our strategies we're going to be way more powerful um and so i like to think of it as um voluntary uh cooperation across the states um and it really works really well but we have a process that we go through um and it's hard i mean it's a great question because it's not simple and in particular when rights are in conflict are the times that it's hard um but i'm always looking for that dialectic over there yes your whole life no no i was reading she said i was i was reading it for our then five-year-old son's whole life it was for his whole life yes it can be summed up in a single sentence but i won't do that for you but it can be um well i wrote a whole i wrote a piece about it after i had read it a couple times that um you can find on the new york review books website um where i tried to report on my journey um and um uh you know it's not i i having read it twice i may not ever read it read it again um but whereas with ulysses i know i'll go back to that like that book and then the short stories in delpiners those are the things i think he where he just succeeded almost any other writer in english at least of his time and um so but finnigan's wake is to me i think i counted a failure ultimately but it's a really fascinating interesting often amusing and sometimes even delightful failure but i come for you with season that i 30 pages of finnigan's wake i missed yeah no you need a lot of hand holding to get through it and there are a lot of people out there who will hold your hand so guys um i am we're gonna close now because there's a movie starting here but i want i want to talk to you about something incredibly important there are three entities that are going to benefit from what i'm gonna ask you to do one is the aclu who gets all of our royalties from this book the other is brookline book smith the bulwark against the terrifying hegemony of amazon i cannot tell you as someone who absolutely what always happens in independent bookstores is people come in and they get the benefit of the brilliant booksellers and they ask for their recommendations and then they order the books from amazon on their phone not okay we need institutions like brookline book smith and simon and shuster which went out on a real limb here and spent a lot of money on this book so please i am begging you i never ask this for my own book or for mike don't even buy don't buy our books buy this book buy two please we needed to do well for all of these organisms yes it's exactly one for you and one for your sweetie exactly all right thank you guys so much and we'll see you across the way thank you thanks very much