 Welcome. It's 101 Eastern. Welcome to Vision, a show about the trends, ideas, and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. Our rights are not inert immutable statues that we gaze at from afar. They exist inside our society. They respond to and shape real facts about how we live and interact. And for no right is this more clearly apparent than free expression. The basic concepts animating the American conception of free speech have a kind of timeless resonance. It's as simple as you get to believe what you want and say what you want. Yet the things we think and the things we say are rooted in the times that we live also rooted in the times that we live are the contours of what ideas and thoughts are considered acceptable. And what is acceptable inevitably raises questions about what should be or can be allowable. Just this last week, a fewer has erupted over a letter in Harper's signed by over 100 intellectuals, raising concerns that while the current of moment the current moment of reckoning, particularly about race is welcome. It has brought with it quote, an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty close quote. And the letter has occasioned no little controversy online and off since its publication, but also implicit in this quote is really the vexed train of contemporary discussions about free expression. The sometimes perceived tension between what makes an environment inclusive versus what makes an environment open and free. The internet in amplifying all kinds of speech, including shaming and reproach, and the politicization of our concept of the right to free speech. There are few people as expert in both the law of free speech, and in its contemporary politics than Dr. Mary Anne Franks who was a professor of law and the Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami and the President of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and so today it's our great pleasure to welcome to the show. Mary Anne Franks thank you for being with us. Thank you for having me. So I'd love to start you have a, you have a recent book, very provocatively titled called the Cult of the Constitution. That's about sort of a right to free speech and the way that's been politicized and also the right to bear arms and second amendment how that's been politicized. So I'd love to sort of before we get into the issues of today just tell us a bit about that book and what that book argues about about the Constitution about our society. So the book is essentially trying to talk about fundamentalism and extremism, which a lot of people understand in the religion context I think people understand what it means to take a scripture or a text and to essentially make it so that their interpretation of it just so happens to fit their world view and to advance their world view, and that anyone who disagrees is not just someone who disagrees but is someone who's a heretic and deserves perhaps ostracism and maybe even violence. And I'm trying to say in the book that that is something that has really happened to the, the Constitution in the United States that there are many people who do something very similar to what religious fanatics do with certain scriptures. And I want to talk about that as a diagnosis for people's attachment to their own self interest on the one hand, and they're cowardice on the other hand in not acknowledging that that's really what they want is to always come out on top for themselves or for their tribe. So instead of being able to just say that that that is what they want to do, that these are people who are appropriating the Constitution and the rights in the Bill of Rights to try to say no this is what the First Amendment demands or this is what the Second Amendment commands us to do, and in that sense trying to disavow the fact that it just so happens that the same people who have always had more power whether that's with regard to speech or with regards to guns or regard to any other right or privilege. So it just so happens that our constitutional interpretations just happen to keep that status quo in place and that gives people this kind of authority and it gives them the sense that they are fighting on behalf of some great principle, as opposed to fighting on behalf of their own privileges. And so how does this land in in the issue of free expression in particular what are the kinds of arguments that we might think are genuine arguments, but that sort of along the lines of the logic of this book are really just appropriations of language about what were what kind of right to free expression were entitled to. I think we look at specifically at the question of free speech and ask ourselves who is it that actually struggles to be heard, because everyone as you were mentioning in the introduction. Everyone wants to say at a certain time I'm being silenced I am being canceled I am being suppressed in some ways. There's this real expansionism when it comes to what we think freedom of speech entails and who we think the threats to that freedom of speech are. There's a huge expansion in terms of what we think about censorship that everything can be censorship. And it seems as though that definition has become collapsed into censorship is every time someone doesn't enthusiastically welcome and promote the things that I want to say. That's a troubling phenomenon in itself, but what's even more troubling is how very little variety we've ever gotten in all of the centuries right that we've had to work this out in terms of who gets to speak freely. If you ask who is speaking all the time right there's obvious power in politics there's obvious business interests there's obvious educational institutions. And primarily, all of them really are run by the same people primarily white wealthy men who have always had more access to those institutions and to platforms than anyone else. And yet they're also oftentimes the very one saying I can't get my speech heard the way that I want the speech to be heard. And we've never actually lived through a historical moment where we've centered the speech of women or centered the speech of non white men. We've always had sort of the same people running this monolithic culture of freedom of speech, and that should trouble all of us, because if our theory and our practice for all of this time have been able to produce only this kind of monolith. And there's something deeply impoverished about that way of looking at freedom of speech. But thinking about there's so thinking about things like like the Harper's letter for example there's no question that there's a that there's a version of interpreting that line of argument. That you know like there's a dominant discourse that just wants to sort of defend its moat, you know it's it's it's castle and of course it's going to react to a moment when others are really visibly claiming the right to speak in a way that is really hard to ignore, really visibly surfacing the ways in which they have not had voice in a way that's really hard to ignore. But there's also, I think a line of argument, animating that kind of that the kind of thing that you saw in that letter which is that folks who say I get that I accept everything that you just said, Dr. Franks, but the penalty for certain ideas is now so high it's not that I think I need speech needs to be centered on me I recognize that there are real asymmetries and who gets to speak and who feels they can speak in the But I fear that if I disagree now with the people being recentered, you know the penalty is disqualification rather than censure this what do you think of that sort of lighter version of the argument about the moment. Well there's always something legitimate about the criticism that we are as a culture because again I think it's very important to distinguish the First Amendment's protections and how it protects us only against state interference and how a huge part of the dysfunction of this debate is that there's so much constitutional illiteracy around this question right that we think First Amendment rights are everywhere when they're actually really not there. They're right. No questions, but this larger question about the culture of free speech. Yeah, sure of criticism and disagreement and dissent. All of that is very important and if the diagnosis is we as a culture have become more biased that there's more temptation to say you've spoken wrongly or out of the Orthodox view and therefore there's going to be these penalties for you I think we do want to take stock of whether that's improving the state of our public discourse or making it worse. But what I wonder about very many times when people complain about this is there's a lot of sleight of hand that goes on tend to gesture at sort of you know what's going on even the Harper's letter itself right there's a couple of examples that are listed but not very specifically so and so we're left to think a little bit what the authors of the letter are getting at and I think it's always important to think about the question of anecdote versus evidence that you don't want to turn to a couple of incidents and say oh this was a bad situation where someone lost their job because they did something that was perfectly legitimate. Those are bad stories they're always bad stories but the question really has to be what's the proportion of that versus other things that we should be worried about when it comes to freedom of speech. And it is if we think that it's bad that people can be fired for their views I wonder how much of that really should be a conversation about the at will employment nature of right. If we're wondering about getting criticized for something that that again seems to loop back on itself right that you're not immune from criticism if you take a stand that is unpopular and nobody should be asking for insulation from criticism. One of the things that I think are legitimate to worry about and I would classify those as harassment right if someone is sending you death threats if they are doxing you if they are publishing where your school where your child goes to school. If they are finding new photos of you and publishing them on the internet, then yes we should be worried about those kinds of things because no one deserves to have those things happen to them. And then we're back to this question of well then who's complaining about that because women again and non white men and minorities of every stripe essentially have had to deal with that all this time. So the idea that anybody's waking up to a moment of Oh suddenly people like me are experiencing these negative sensorious silencing kinds of actions. So I hope that that would prompt someone to think well who else has been experiencing that for much longer and sort of in a much greater scale, because if we don't care about those people, I think it always demonstrates that we're back to that question of how sincere you being if you don't care about something happening to you that happens 10 times as often to someone else, then maybe you don't care about that thing you care about you. I'd always want that to be the question that we always want that to be the approach we take whether that's to the Harper's letter or anything else. How much of this is trying to actually point out something proportionally wrong with the fact that certain groups and people with certain views or identities are disproportionately being silenced and being harassed and being tormented for views and nothing more. Right over their identity. Yeah, go ahead. No, so I definitely want to come back to that because you've written a lot about I think the way the internet in particular confuses us in terms of thinking about what is expression but just to sort of stand this for a little bit. I mean, and I think your right to recent rice on this is not about our First Amendment rights this is about a culture of openness and why we value that and how we value that. So I would accept, definitely I would be would would would would be sympathetic to, I think, and think we all should be sympathetic to sort of most of the premises you'd advanced I think we should not underrate the kind of disingenuine retrenchment not always malicious. That's going on with these are I think there's some fear that's animating some of these arguments in some cases but but but some of it is definitely malicious. I'm a state senator cares about what's being said in a college campus. I sort of question what the motivation is the the and I think also I think we absolutely have to be sympathetic to the evidence the evidence. If it's about a culture of openness, the question is what views are being aired in like white men's views are being aired white men don't need to worry that their views are being aired, whether they individually feel that they're the the the author of those views the agent of those I guess I wonder though about the positive potential. So, so I, I think the sort of I think you're right. I think the sort of the negative argument against retributive kind of a retributive approach to to to whatever deviant ideas are is fake. But I wonder, is there more positive potential to less retributive models if we have sort of more restorative sense that you said this thing. It's a deviant view or it hurts people. Is there more because you know when I think about say like restorative versus retributive justice the power of restorative justice isn't like we stop talking about the defendant and start talking about all those voices right that it's about testimony. Yeah, so like I've thought for like why when a college professor says something that uses a racial epithet for pedagogical reasons. Why shouldn't that person be subjected to hearing from a bunch of students and what their experiences are feeling that what that might would that maybe be more powerful, you know in recruiting that professor and others in exactly the kind of project that you describe. I'm glad that you've narrowed it in that sense because a huge part about the huge aspect of the health of our public discourse has to do with what do we want people to do what what kind of discourse do we want to have and the idea that someone says something or does something that gets them sort of pushed out of the public sphere. Again, not to not to turn that into hyperbole right and there are worse things have been pushed out of the public sphere of Twitter or the cases but but certainly it's a question we should always ask ourselves what do we want society to do going forward if a person makes a mistake if a person is somewhere along their journey is advocating something that seems ill intended right and again we have to be very specific about what we mean here there's a huge difference between making a mistake or not having thought something through and actually taking an entrenched position that is racist or sexist or what have first of all I think we just need a lot more precision about what it is that we're talking about. To the extent that we want to have a healthy free speech discourse it has got to be the case that yes we want more conversations we don't want to say that that we've condemned you because of some action that you've taken. One of the worst impulses of the internet is that first of all it makes us all impulsive and it makes us all judgmental about other people's impulses. So you get rewarded for having reactions that are not very well thought through because immediacy is kind of the name of the game. You get rewarded for having more sort of polemical ideas or sort of you know here's my hot take on something that the kind of reward for performative contrarianism is just really high online. And then you also get rewarded for calling people out for doing all those things and so you've got the sick cycle of people just doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. And I've written recently about how it's useful in some ways to compare that the speech norms of the internet broadly speaking to the speech norms of the university. And again I'm speaking extremely broadly and abstractly here but the idea that I would want to promote of the norms of the university are conversations. Every professor knows what it's like to have a student in class who says something that other students are not only offended by but hurt by it might even feel endangered by. What do you do you can't just send the student away and say you're no longer part of this conversation at least you know outside of really dramatic situations. Your job is to continue to have a conversation in some ways that makes people feel as though they can still contribute and that they can process what's happening we don't have to make a judgment about that person or about that statement or about that sentiment. We can subject it to the community the community's examination and the community's responses to this and you can talk through all of those things. Those are the kinds of norms I wish we had more of as opposed to the internet norms of you've said a thing and now you're no longer on the end or whatever the case. It's just it's an incredibly the internet norms of speech are incredibly bad and I mean that in the sense of they produce bad speech in the sense that it's less informed. Less reflective less thoughtful less generous less compassionate and less interesting, and that it is always better to have a community where we talk about people disagreeing because there isn't. I hope I hope most people would not want to actually advocate that there's one orthodox position on all of these issues that everyone has to conform to as opposed to a conversation people can have or choose not to have if they're not interested in it about truly vexed or complex social issues. Yeah, I would agree that I may I would even take it further I think I think the internet norms of speech on internet encourage bad faith speech right like there's something there's something really implicit in the educational model you know which is that you're pedagogically you're intrinsically interested in the other person being better off as a result of this interaction now whether that's on their terms or not that's the debate but I. That's another form of sort of disingenuous behavior right that you're alluding to which is a lot of folks who raise these concerns of I'm being shut down. They don't fail they don't pass the test of I'm thinking about what is really what is going to leave the marginalized person better off here I sustaining the argument for openness on that basis should be something that we should have to listen to to and and and respond to so let's let's talk about norms of speech on the internet norms of conduct as you've talked a lot about this I think one of the really powerful ideas that you've written about that I really think is reshaped. The discussion about the internet is that the companies like to talk about everything as content that it's all the same kind of thing. Thank you and Danielle Citrone who I know you work with have to have have sort of have sort of called the question on this. And so could you talk a little bit about that about the ways in which the internet sort of fools us into thinking everything is speech when in fact there are these really important distinctions to be made. Yeah so that's a huge part of why there's a whole chapter in my book on the internet and it's called the cult of the internet is because I think the internet has kind of accelerated all of our worst impulses when it comes to thinking shallowly about what speeches versus what conduct is just for starters. That is, you know, as anyone who's really spent any time thinking about the First Amendment or free speech in the offline context knows there are real contested boundaries between speech and conducts there is a there has been on the part of First Amendment First Amendment jurisprudence and expansive notion of expressive conduct so that it's not just things that have to be written or things that are said, but there's nonetheless a boundary between what is considered speech and what are other things right and there's you can take simplistic formulations of this to say that I might mean something very expressive if I punch you in the face but that doesn't make it speech as opposed to conduct and it doesn't mean that we presume that you're allowed to punch people if you have a really serious message to convey with it. So the problem one of the problems of the internet is that it essentially and this is something that has been contributed to by laws like section 230 but also by cyber idealists and the tech industry promoting this idea that essentially everything online is speech when of course it's not I mean there's a there's an incredible sort of double consciousness about this where people are fully aware of how we're doing everything online now and you buy products online you get educated online you socialize online you buy guns online. So on the one hand we recognize how much the internet has become completely intertwined with all of our daily activities. And at the same time when it comes to questions about regulation or about how to understand those activities suddenly we're talking about as though it's speech. And once it becomes speech it's oh you can't touch it no matter how bad it is there's always even if there's bad speech online or bad activities it can be countered with other kinds of speech. And all of that's just wrong it's not it wouldn't be right in the offline context and it's no more right in the online context. And so a big part of the problem with the with what the internet has done to us when it comes to the free speech question is that it short circuited this examination that we should be doing of whether certain activities should qualify as speech or whether or not there should be considered conduct and that is huge ramifications for how we behave online. So I do think a big part of getting away from that has got to be a step back from this vague kind of abstract notion of the internet being all about speech. It's not it's clearly not. And we need to be having hard conversations about where the boundaries are of what someone's activity online is versus their pure speech in the sense of expressing problematic views on Twitter. What do you what do you I sort of want to ask about kind of causes and solutions like on the causes side. Why are we here is this just nefarious regulatory arbitrage. Is this some really smart First Amendment lawyers in Silicon Valley 20 years ago saying hey let's just call it a speech or or is it that have we have we backed our way into this position by is this just sort of an innocent mistake we've made that we took a platform that is a was a communications platform and then suddenly found ourselves in a set of integral institutions as you describe. Well as with all complex social issues there's a mix of answers. I think part of it is that no there are people who at the time let's say in the 1990s and cyber idealism really took hold who knew exactly what they were doing. And then there were people who I think truly were sort of drinking the Kool-Aid on this right that they really did think and I should back up and not even not even be that contemptuous of it in the 90s and in the 80s. Cyber feminism other sort of alternative viewpoints that really thought you know the Internet's actually going to do something radical right because it seems as though especially when you were talking about the early days of the Internet that was not so image based and it was certainly not as all encompassing as our Internet today. The radical thing about it was no one's going to know who you are online and that means that you can actually just exchange ideas with each other and they can't judge you on the basis of your appearance or your gender or your abilities. That there was a remarkable sort of naive idealism to all this that I am actually quite sympathetic to and only wish that it had ever come to pass. Because that is a lovely idea right that you would get to escape your your embodiment and you get to escape that kind of prejudice and really just live in the life of the mind. So I think there was some of that I think there are people who from the very beginning cynically knew that that was not what this was going to be about and then the really tricky thing is you had the the full revolutionary aspect of the of the Internet. I always go back to this to my hobby horse about John Perry Barlow's right about you know cyberspace because you know when he writes that manifesto it's meant to echo the Declaration of Independence and he's not wrong in the sense that it's a revolutionary moment saying we're throwing off the yoke of tyranny. Not sure who was tyrannizing you know John Perry Barlow or the people like him at the time but let's say that there was some kind of tyranny of oppression that that existed for white men. But at the same time not acknowledging the fact that to the extent that there ever was that kind of oppression. There were obviously people that are empowered now coming into power who are now going to do the same thing or continue to do the same thing to everyone that isn't part of their tribe women and non white men. So you have this full revolution right it's like oh we're going to do something so amazing with the Internet. And we don't really care what happens to women and to anybody who's not like us because who what we're really trying to do is to set up ourselves as persecuted minorities as victims of some vague kind of conspiracy out there which we're not allowed to speak our minds we're not allowed to exercise our liberties as opposed to actually having that great revolutionary moment we could have had which is, you know who really could use a revolutionary Internet, or all the people who never actually had the same access to freedom of speech or any of the other liberties. So I think it's a mix of those things and then you get politicians involved to know very little, very often about technology or where it's headed and then you just have kind of the mess that you get in and then you have to have dependence after that and and you also get generation after generation, which the younger they are the more they understand about the Internet than the older generation. And that creates all kinds of problems because the if the younger generation understands technology they don't understand very much about malice and they don't understand very much about long term consequences and they don't understand much about history. And so you have a real disconnect there between those who can say, you have the tools that you understand better than we do and we can see just how badly this is all going to go and that conversation just didn't happen very often those two communities very much. So as the as the as the parent of a four and two year old I can agree that's the asymptotic behavior on the Internet, but I actually I really agree with the call back to the to the Perry bar I think for for listeners it's the declaration of the independence of cyberspace we can send it around. I think it's a great text as well to sort of to your point about the the conceptual framework of a cult like the liturgy among that's that the commercial sector of the Internet around that for a revolution is so palpable I mean you just compare the mission statements in the IPO documents of these companies to like a consumer package you know consumer package of companies mission statement is we make food for people to consume. You know I think ubers is you know igniting movement, you know, or something like that are you know, to liberate you, you know, Airbnb talks constantly about we're not selling we're not renting homes. What we really are as a company that believes that people can trust each other, you know, and be and be I mean I Facebook, you know, I think talks this way Bezos talks this way. So thinking about the solution side though. You know some of the questions we're getting are you know what are the to what extent are these design feature issues on the Internet you know anonymity right as you know is a good example anonymity has liberatory potential. But the reality is it's it's the thing that you use in order to be in an aggressor. What do you what do you what do you think are some of the design elements of the Internet that are responsible for this versus the sort of structural regulatory questions that I know you also think about a lot. Well you've touched on a big one I think the anonymity question is, again, the long standing tradition in the United States of thinking that anonymous speech is good is premised on a certain amount of safety and a certain amount of insulation from consequences right so anonymity when used by those who are vulnerable as a way of protecting themselves from the powerful is something that we should respect and is an important part of any healthy functioning democracy. The problem is of course that with the Internet you don't get to dole out the anonymity and the good benefits of the structure to those who actually want good things. Every tool that you could have that a vulnerable person could make use of is going to be exploited by a person who means harm and anonymity is one amplifications another and those two things are very closely tied that instead of just being the person who's screaming in the corner about how much you hate women or black people, you can now access a platform of other people screaming about the same thing and now you can become a whore that then targets individuals that you don't like. That's a huge problem that the Internet has really sort of facilitated. The other thing is the question of permanence that if you at some point we could have thought of harassment as being as having a shelf life right you have bad experiences maybe within your school or work, a certain town, all of that is bad can be devastating but at some point you'll be able to exit. There's no exiting from Internet harassment or at least in at least in many cases there's not it follows you wherever you go so that permanence aspect of it which is also closely tied to the captivity aspect of it. A lot of our free speech norms are premised on the idea that if you don't like certain speech you can just ignore it. How are you going to ignore the fact that if someone has targeted you for harassment that they put that your name next to private information about them, they have libel you and put a website out there that actually just is dedicated to assassinating your character and that's the first thing anyone's going to see if they do a search for your name. You don't actually get a chance to opt out and there's no way that people can really escape from, for instance what the president says on Twitter you can't just say why don't I get I'm not going to listen to it so in some ways it's all of the premises that we might have had for a working free speech norms in our culture are upended by what the Internet makes possible and yet we haven't adjusted our norms to think about that. What do you think about we're getting a lot of questions about, you know, cancel culture and you know, I did I think there are some folks who think just sort of along the lines of what you're suggesting right that like certain experiences that in the analog world can be ignored or not objectionable feel qualitatively different when like 10,000 people are doing them to you at the same even things that we wouldn't consider really harassment. You know, I mean, I, I, you know, there I've heard accounts of people who really wield quite a lot of power but who have been criticized online and describing that experience of that those days is like it felt like the whole world, you know, was was was sort of suffocating feeling that the world has turned against you what do you how do how do we help us navigate the things like cancel culture which we're making a lot out of help us navigate what what parts of these problems should we really focus on and what parts of these problems are again, you know, the powerful finding some excuse to defend their domain. I think part of the problem is this kind of terminology right cancel culture is right up there with snowflakes and safe spaces and all the rest of it. There's so many terms and concepts that have just become emptied out of all meaning because everyone can use them in ways that are highly selective and subjective. And I worry that you know, like the Harper's letter, all these kinds of terms have become workshop tests for people, and we're not actually agreeing on what those concepts mean and so they have really limited utility when we're trying to diagnose those problems. So I think that you know where to start with that. I don't know where to start with that right because if we can't even get onto the same page about what our goals are. What chance do we have so that sense of here I want to borrow from a legal standard in the harassment context from the legal standard, especially in title nine and title seven context. Severe or pervasive. I guess I should bracket title nine perspective because of recent developments but let's stick with title for seven for a second severe or pervasive. That's I think very wise in some ways as a recognition of the kind of damage certain types of harassing activity can have on a person or as you say maybe not even thought of in isolation as harassment. I've heard in the sense that one single incident of someone doxing your private address is enough to make a whole life change, but also someone who just sends you I don't know some kind of crude mock up of your child or something along those lines, and it's 30 times a day or 100 times a day or three times a day. That's pervasive and it's something that's going to get inside your head in some ways and it's going to occupy your mental energies, as well as your actual energy so that you don't get other things done. And I don't think anyone who's never been on the receiving end of that kind of harassment understands just how much it really does take away from your power to do anything else. One thing again I'd like to move away from the individual examples and many cases and think about that right where do we locate, where how do we measure what it means when someone is experiencing that kind of harassment or that kind of targeted attention, such that it means that they don't really get to contribute to the community anymore such that they don't get to do the work that they need to do. We all should care about that unless again, we're being constitutional cultists and we only care about us and ourselves and our tribe. We actually do care about freedom of speech we need to ask ourselves well, do we actually think that women can speak freely online, especially if they're making an allegation about sexual assault or they're criticizing a powerful and wealthy white person do we actually think that freedom is anybody else does. Do we think that black lives matter is this is kind of unmitigated success for free speech and there's no consequences for people who decide to identify with that movement or to make to take the risk of protesting in that name. And if we're not spending a lot of time thinking about those things I again I suspect that what we're actually thinking about is just now wait I want the world to be comfortable for me. Don't worry that another aspect of the internet that makes all of this so much worse is, we put an extraordinary emphasis on how we feel, as opposed to descriptive accounts of what the world is like, and we're back to that question of anecdote versus evidence of what I feel as though this is canceling me I feel as though I don't get to have a platform I want. We, I wish we could flip a switch to say that it doesn't actually matter that much how you feel it matters how much you can measure it and explain in a semi objective way how much harm it's causing certain communities, because if all we have a subjective feelings clearly we're going to just to send into tribalism very much the way that we have, and everybody who has learned that the language of victimhood can be powerful is simply going to adopt that language and so we've got to have some metrics in place so to speak to stop that from happening. I agree with that except for my subjective feelings no I agree with that I so last so last question how about. So I think this is a good tip for for maybe getting a preview of where for our audience of where your work is going so you know you've demystified the sort of ecclesiastic authorities that have that are protecting their own their own domain, initiate what are the new mysteries you know what are what are the elements of what you think is a positive conception of of both a law of and a culture of expression that also is you know centered on on on the real the real concerns of the voices that we aren't hearing that we are preventing from being heard that we're missing in our discussion what are some of the ideas that are part of what you think is is a is a better framework. So the concept that I'm really focusing on in my recent work and on the next book that I'm writing now is on this concept this Greek conception of freedom of speech called paracea, and that's that's been translated as free speech, but I think we've in lost the limits of that concept I'm a little worried that that concept has become indeed out of all meaning. And in the 1980s, the French philosopher Michel Foucault sort of revisited the concept of paracea and said you know the better translation of it is fearless speech not free speech. And he offered all these illuminating ways of distinguishing between just sort of reckless speech as I'm calling it and fearless speech and the characteristics that I'm sort of glossing on here first and foremost that the fearless speaker is someone who speaks sincerely, and by sincerely that means someone who actually owns the ideas that they're advancing they don't hide behind anonymity they don't try to pretend as though they were just playing a character they actually have to say this is who I am and this is what I think even if I'm wrong. And it also has to involve risk taking and risk taking, importantly, to oneself not to other people because I think if there's one classification or one categorization that's more important than any other. When it comes to talking about speech today it's who is getting who is experiencing the burden of the risk. Yeah, does your speech impose risk on other people, especially vulnerable people or does risk or does your speech impose risk on yourself. So I'm drawing a distinction between what I'm calling reckless speech which I think American culture in particular has a fetish for and fearless speech reckless speech is the contrarian the provocative that the person motivated to simply troll and to see whether or whether or not they can cause harm to someone else or to be careless about it to take substantial and unjustified risk to use legal language with regards to other people's actual welfare. And by contrast the concept I'm excited by is the concept of fearless speech where someone risks something sincerely to themselves by speaking truth to power in a way that actually might cause real harm for them in the long run. So I want to take those qualifications of sincerity of owning what it is that you are saying and being willing to accept the consequences to yourself, especially when you're critiquing someone who has got more power than you have or at least has more ability to do damage than you those are the kinds of speakers I want us to valorize more in our culture. There's no reason why we have to to think that our free speech heroes have got to be reduced to the KKK and Larry Flint. There's lots of other important valuable fearless speech that we could celebrate and describe and have as our inherent tradition and that's what I really want to focus on and I would love for our culture to focus on in a in a meaningful sense. Just to put you on the spot a little bit is there a person or a moment that you've been thinking about for the book that is a perfect example of fearless speech that's not celebrated or under celebrated or even been criticized that you've been thinking about. Well I've been thinking about a lot of different examples and one of the ones that the one that motivates the book is actually not an American example but it was where I began thinking about this concept most intensely. One example. This is a young woman named Sophie Shull who was a member of the White Rose which was a very small student resistance group in Nazi Germany and they were engaging these students were engaging in this essentially a consciousness raising kind of activities where they were taking the same inputs to let the German people know what the Nazis were actually doing because of course the Nazis were using propaganda to say that that what they were really engaged in was a great battle against evil elements and the White Rose was taking these steps to try to show the people what they were actually doing and they got caught and they got caught in Sophie Shull was the only female member of this group and there's a record of her last words her last speech as she's being led to the guillotine because they were when they were caught they were tried I think within a couple of days and they were sentenced the very same day and sentenced to death for what they had done because she wouldn't renounce the White Rose she would renounce her brother she stuck to her principles about this and the you know I can't do her words justice but the concept that she I think left the world with that she was going towards her death was to say I had to do this I had to speak up because if I wasn't going to do it who was going to do it. And now I am going to have to pay the ultimate price for that but it was worth it. And I think about that concept the idea that that is a person who took a risk took the ultimate risk to say the truth. And then I think about the ways that we have had people in our history and American history specifically to that have done the same thing or have done lesser versions of this that is it doesn't always have to be death defying it can be taking risks and other sense I think about the me too movement so many of the women who come forward have taken that kind of risk. I think about Ida Wells I think about all the abolitionists I think about. Essentially everybody throughout history who was threatened or was lynched or was threatened with destruction of their career of their families I think of all the women and men writing today who are getting up every day and doing this kind of work and trying to highlight the wrongs of our world knowing that they're going to be threatened and harass and intimidated for doing so and those are the people that I really want to celebrate. Fantastic well this has been a tremendous inspiring and urgent conversation. You can follow Mary and follow progress on the book at m a underscore Frank's you can find the cult of the Constitution are deadly devotion to guns and free speech anywhere books are sold encourage you to check it out. We'll send this information to you after the show along with a couple of variants recent writings but very and thank you so much for joining us really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Before we go everyone I want to tell you about what's coming up on vision. Next week on July 16 will be having American media and technology lawyer and a BSE ed on July 23 will be hearing from Eugene Volick who's a first amendment law professor at UCLA. And on July 30 the London Nelson who's the president of the Social Science Research Council will be joining us as reminder this episode will be up on the website and you can see this episode and any episode on demand at kf.org slash vision follow us send us an email at vision at kf.org or follow us on Instagram at vision dot kf. Please take the survey that's up on your screen now and as always we will end the show to the sounds of Miami singer songwriter Nick County you can find his music on Spotify until next week thanks for joining us and stay safe.