 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch Tank Peoples. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Jonathan Zimmerman and Cygney Wilkinson, co-authors of Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday May 18th at 7 p.m. we'll host a panel discussion celebrating the woman's suffrage centennial. Our panelists will discuss the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020, the events that were planned across the country, and what we learned during that turbulent year. And on Wednesday May 19th at noon, Daniel Carpenter will be here to talk about his new book, Democracy by Petition. Carpenter examines the transformation of the use of the petition in the 19th century American democracy. At the founding of our federal government, the protection of individual rights was written into our constitution. Spelling out those rights in the Bill of Rights was a necessary step in getting all the states to ratify the new government charter. First among the amendments was a prohibition of government interference in the people's freedom of speech, yet throughout our history we have seen tension between the exercise of this right and the urge to curb it. In words and images, Jonathan Zimmerman and Sidney Wilkinson's new book, Free Speech, celebrates our freedom of speech and points out why we need to be ready to defend it. Jonathan Zimmerman is the Judy and Howard Berkowitz Professor in Education and Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. Zimmerman is the author of several books including histories of the Little Red Schoolhouse in the United States and of sex education around the world. He's published more than 400 op-eds and reviews in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun, and other major newspapers and magazines. He's taught for 20 years at New York University where he received its Distinguished Teaching Award in 2008. Sidney Wilkinson has been recognized as one of the nation's leading cartoonists since 1992 when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning for her work at the Philadelphia Daily News. She was the first woman to be so honored. She has received four Thomas Nast Awards from the Overseas Press Club and two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group, she was named the Philadelphia Enquirer and Daily News Editorial Cartoonist in 2012. Her work appears regularly in publications around the country and has been included in several books. Our moderator for today's conversation is Nadid Strossen, an American civil liberties activist who has written, taught, and advocated extensively in the areas of constitutional law and civil liberties. From 1991 to 2008 she served as president of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation's largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Professor Strossen is currently a member of the ACLU's National Advisory Council, as well as the advisory boards of Electronic Privacy Information Center, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Heterodox Academy, and the National Coalition Against Censorship. Now let's hear from Jonathan Zimmerman, Sidney Wilkinson, and Nadine Strossen. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for that introduction and many thanks to everyone at the National Archives for hosting this event. As someone who obviously reveres the ideals that are reflected in our nation's founding documents, which we've been working hard to approach in reality, the National Archives for me is one of the most moving, inspiring places in the world. And it's a great setting for this great book because John's and Sidney's book brilliantly transmits our founding ideals to a younger generation, inspiring them to continue the enduring efforts to translate those ideals into present day realities for everyone. So I'm going to start with you, John. Why did you write the book? Who are your ideal readers? What message do you want to convey? Well, the real reason I wrote the book is that Sidney Wilkinson emailed me and asked me to write it. And you get an email from her, you act. I mean, we're talking about one of the great cartoonists of our era of our times. I mean, to be like a football player was asked if you wanted to play with Tom Brady, you know, like the answer is yes. And when I started to write it, I realized what my real message was. It was a message to people younger than me, which by the way is almost everyone at this state, but mainly to my students and also to my young adult daughters. Because in my experience, many people in the younger generations have developed a skepticism about the free speech and in some places have even developed animosity towards it. And this was very much crystallized for me during this kind of seminal meeting that I had with Mary Beth Tinker. Mary Beth Tinker, of course, being the 13 year old girl who wore the black armband to school in Des Moines, Iowa in 1965 was sent home and later sued with the others. And this became the Tinker v. Des Moines case in which the Supreme Court upheld student speech rights. Anyway, Mary Beth Tinker came to my class at the University of Pennsylvania and she told her story with the armband. And then the students started asking questions. And the first question was, look, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight. You were fighting the war in Vietnam. These people today that spew hate, racist and sexist hate, these homophobes and transphobes, they just want to hurt people. Why should they be allowed to speak? And Mary Beth Tinker had a very pointed response, which I'll never forget. She said, Listen, at my middle school in Des Moines, there were schools that had dads and uncles and brothers that were risking their lives in Southeast Asia. You don't think they were hurt by this snot nose kid telling them that they're loved ones for maybe gonna die for a lie? Of course they were. Speed hurts. And that's actually precisely why we need to protect it. Because it hurts, there's always going to be an impulse to snap it down. But when you do, it's actually the people at the bottom that are going to be hurt. And I mean, really hurt. I censored and that was Mary Beth's other message. You know, some of the other students said, Look, free speech is just something about power. People with power use that term to protect their own speed, then to prevent others from using it. And Mary Beth said, No, you've got it wrong. It's the opposite. In 1965, I was a 13 year old girl. And speech was the only power that I had. And across time, and this was the real message to the book, people without power have used free speech to challenge their circumstances and to challenge their oppression, which is really what he was doing, because until that time, students really didn't have any rights, not ones that the Constitution recognized. So that's really what I want to communicate to my students and others, the radical history and potential of free speech. I hadn't known that story about Sydney being the instigator of the book. Sydney, I have to say, John has such a great sense of humor. I never know when he's teasing. But I gathered this was literally how how the book came into existence. Can you tell us what what prompted you to to reach out to him and to contribute your your brilliant cartoons? Well, I've been cartooning for almost 40 years. And I depend on the free speech amendment every single day, really. And I've seen so many times when people have criticized me and saying, she can't say that. I was once speaking at a cartoonist convention, and we had visitors from the the Middle East, all men. And I was on the podium, and I was speaking. And they said to the host, is she allowed to say that? Which, by the way, was the title of Molly Ivan's book, the great and very provocative writer of who died about 10 years or so ago. But anyway, it's crucial for cartoonists and cartoonists around the world have been imprisoned, and sometimes even killed because of their cartoons, they've gone into exile or or underground. Even after the cartooning controversy in the early 2000s, a a an artist in in Seattle did a cartoon about draw Mohammed Day, and it was teasing it was sort of making fun of the controversy. It wasn't an attack on Islam. And yet she was put on a botwatt list, and went into has gone underground and has, you know, it that shouldn't be in the United States of America. So and that's current, that was, you know, within the last 10 years. And the other thing I really want to say, and I'll say it again, is that I've been called everything. And I've been picketed. Our paper has been picketed. But we invite the picketers in and they then get a place in the in the paper to respond. And then it goes back and forth among readers. So my my belief is that really controversial virtual cartoons, just like controversial statements, records, movies, books, they don't end a conversation, they begin one. And sometimes it takes something pretty controversial just to get people to really engage in the issue. So for me, it's free speech. And is is just it's like the platform on which I stand. And so do the cartoonist of the rest of the cartoonists in the United States of America. Thank you very much. I recently was reminded that you are one of many, not many, a small group of illustrious cartoonists from around the world who was interviewed for a forthcoming book that is going to focus specifically on cartoon censorship. Well, getting back to this wonderful book with wonderful in prose and in pictures. John, since the book is aimed at students and presumably their teachers as well, it's especially interesting for them to understand their own free speech rights and and the challenges to them. So they understand that this is not just affecting other people at other times in history and other parts of the world. So what do you tell them what's their stake in these issues now? Well, their stake is enormous. It's enormous because before Mary Beth Tinker schools could silence anybody that they wanted universities in some places as well. And it's really only in the last half century that young people have received any kind of speech rights that again are, you know, enforced by law and by courts. But I think the most important thing to remember is all these rights are extremely tenuous, and they are always under attack. And that's precisely why we have to study their history and we have to be vigilant about protecting them. So right now, there's a case that just mentioned the Supreme Court about a cheer leader in northeast from Pennsylvania, who was disciplined by her school for a text message that she sent on a Saturday from a convenience store. This is after she had failed to make cheerleading team and she texted f school f cheerleading. And the school suspended disciplined her and said she couldn't be on the cheerleading team. And they said that they needed to do this in order to protect order. Well, that's always what sensors say, is it not? There's going to be some terrible consequence. People are going to say or do or think the wrong thing and we've got to blot it out. But of course, where is this end? Most educators that I know did not get into the business in order to monitor people's snap cats and Instagrams. And I think this is a really important compelling example of why a we have to be aware of how recent this history is that there have been any rights at all. And be and most importantly, we have to be vigilant about protecting them. I'm proud to say that that that current case, the Mahoney case is an ACLU case, as was the tinker case, as have been every single one of the Supreme Court's free speech case is going all the way back to the 1940s. And the implications as you as you indicate, John, are are enormous because schools are basically saying they have authority to regulate anything that might potentially disrupt the school. I think I can't see an exception to that, or that would essentially squelch meaningful free speech for students. But what about teachers? What's what's their stake in this? Well, I would say in some ways the stake is even greater, because alas, I think the courts have been even less attentive and protective of teacher rights than they have of student rights. So, you know, in 2007, a teacher named Deborah Mayer was teaching a fifth grade class about the war in Iraq actually was in 2003. The case was in 2007. And she was teaching a lesson from the student approved magazine Time for Kids, which included a description and a picture of an anti war protest that would kill many around the time we invaded Iraq. And a kid in the class asked her, you know, Ms. Mayer, have you ever been to an anti war protest? And respond, she said, Yes, as a matter of fact, I drove by one in Bloomington. This is Indiana the other day, and I honk my horn in approval. Because of that, she was not reappointed by the school. And the courts have upheld that. You know, arguing that teachers essentially have to sell their free speech rights to the district in exchange for their jobs. And I think a lot of us wonder how the teachers can actually model discourse and indeed, democracy if we hamstring them in that way. You know, I'd like to ask you both a question. I found the book so which I read twice and learned a lot both times. And I know a fair amount about free speech myself. I just finished teaching an entire semester long law school seminar on freedom of speech. And I still learned a lot and found it, you know, completely appropriate level for me. But obviously, you're also aiming at a younger audience. What age range do you contemplate? I'll first ask you, John, and I'm very curious whether you had to change your arguments or your presentation in any way. And then I'd like to hear from Sydney on that as well. No, definitely. I mean, the answer is no. I mean, first of all, I'm amazed you read it twice. You must be starved for entertainment. I guess the pandemic does that to people. But, you know, to take the first of your question, I mean, I think we imagine anyone from, you know, age 11 or 12 up reading it. I think that we condescend to our young people often by assuming that they either can't understand or won't care about these questions. But as the Mahoney case illustrates, I think that in some ways these questions are more urgent for young people than anybody else. And we absolutely wrote it in an idiom and in a tone that we hope can really be understood by anybody from middle schoolers up. And Sydney, I know that you have some of the cartoons. Maybe this is an appropriate time for you to show some of them and comment on them. And I'd love to hear John's comments about them as well. Yeah, please, both of you, feel free to jump in. I'm just going to share my screen here. Here's the book title, but because this isn't a new, I'm going to talk about starting with the cartoons. And of course, they've been big in the news here the last couple decades. But pointed editorial political controversial cartoons go way back. And so I thought I'd start with the guy who sort of credited to be the father of Western cartooning. And I'm sure you're all guessing exactly who it is, which would be Martin Luther. 500 years ago, Martin Luther was protesting the influence of the Pope and Rome on his German community and his beliefs. And to illustrate his feelings towards Rome, he hired local artists and used the fairly new printing press to create woodcuts to illustrate his point. And let's see here. It's where I'm just... Well, I would have flown to that that test. I would never have answered Martin Luther. There we go. Here's one of them with a couple of his supporters sticking out their tongues, burying their bottoms, and farting in the face of the Pope. Now, this is not an image that I would have used in a daily newspaper in my world. But the consequences of free speech for him were possible death at the time. So we'll just fast forward 300 years. This is a clipped history to a German immigrant to the United States who became America's greatest cartoonist ever, and that is Thomas Nass. This is one of his iconic images of rich people in New York of the time. But he was also known for criticizing, absolutely skewering, a guy named Boss Tweed, who was the Democratic political leader, or Democrat Party political leader of his time. And Tweed said, I don't care what they print in the newspapers, my constituents can't read, but stop them damn pictures. And what people forget about Nass was that also he was a huge supporter of Abraham Lincoln and anti-slavery. He was against slavery. And Lincoln called him my best recruiting sergeant. This is his brilliant engraving done just two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. We can talk about cancel culture later, but he did do controversial cartoons that people still don't like. And he has been canceled several times by several organizations. And yet this is what he did for America. Fast forward again to the early 1900s, and then we get into some of the things that we talked about in the book with women's suffrage. These women not only protested and marched, but about 20 or more cartoonists came out, or women came out of their normal lives and started cartooning for suffrage. And as you know, women went to jail. Alice Paul was in prison for her pre-speech rights. So these women were using their pens. This is Neil Brinkley. Any man who loves and reveres his mother and his country should idolize if he worships it all. The three graces, suffrage, preparedness, and Americanism. Sorry my dog's going off on the mailman. Yeah, exactly. And also at this time Margaret Sanger was actively agitating for rights for women, for birth control, and getting attacked by police and driven off the stage time and time again. So this is from our book. Go ahead, speak freely, and fast forward again to the man who was probably our most eloquent ever user of free speech, Martin Luther King, whose whole, his only weapon was his free speech. And he used it as we all know brilliantly, and he paid for it of course with his life. But to put it in modern terms, I mean if you switch how you look at things, the police who were were suppressing and attacking him, we find your speech to be hurtful, Dr. King, who is more than hurtful of course. Onward, in my career, religions have been the most in-skinned sensitive. It's okay if you're praising them. It's a blasphemy if you're not. We need to see it so we know what to ban. This was in a portion of the book about religion. And to prove that we shouldn't be taking them quite so literally after the Danish cartoonist debacle. There were many cartoons defending or protesting the attack on the cartoonists. But I am trying to go for a different point of view. And this one is the big fat book of offensive religious cartoons with all our major religious leaders, including Mohammed, third from the right. And it is that, to make the point I made earlier, that it's okay if people are laughing. If you're showing a religious figure or a political figure happy and laughing, that's okay. It's just criticizing when the image becomes verboten. This cartoon went around the world many, many times after all the cartoon controversies and never has been, you know, never with a problem. Back to our book, what Jonathan has said and what I think the basic point of our book is, is that you can't just muscle people and think that hateful ideas will just go away. I fixed it. No, not exactly. So the one thing I'd like to leave you with about cartoonists is that any teacher knows that it's usually a boy in the back of the room drawing bad images of the teacher. It's just a compulsion that some people have to make fun of the authority figure in front of them. And cartoonists who who are prominent take on the biggest biggest authority figures there are. This man, Ali Fersat, was a Syrian cartoonist who criticized the Syrian regime. He was taken, beaten, and his hand stamped, stomped on to break them so he couldn't draw again. But his first cartoon in the hospital will show you the spirit of a cartoonist from his hospital bed. So there you have it. There's there's the cartooning spirit and just try to keep us down. Thank you. That is so remarkable. I have to ask both of you. I'm thinking of, you know, the great like Gilbert and Sullivan, other great teams of collaborators. Which came first? The cartoons or the text? Well, well, well, I wrote the text first and then and then Signy wrote the cartoons. But I think actually the cartoons are really what make the book. Because I'm a words guy and I think that if you look for example at that terrific one about Martin Luther King, which is my favorite cartoon in the book, I think you get this kind of, it's not just a visual, it's almost a guttural embodiment of what the book is really trying to say. Especially, you know, the awful racist white cops. You know, what you're saying is hurtful to us? Well, of course it is. I mean, just like Mary Beth's armband was hurtful to kids who had dads fighting in Vietnam. That's what speech does, but that's the worst reason to try to censor it. Because once you make that into your rubric, again, there's not going to be any speech left. Well, since you talked about the MLK cartoon and Signy, you talked about, you gave the history of Thomas Nest with respect to emancipation and abolition. I had not known about that. So, yeah, this is why I read your book twice. Every time I interact with either of you. John, do you want to explain, I mean, there are so many, I wouldn't even say arguments today, but even assumptions that if you really care about racial justice, then you have to be very skeptical of free speech. Yeah, and we see this all the time. We see fines on college campuses, hate speeches, not free speech. In fact, even politicians who, some of them graduated from law school, say that. And there's this assumption that, yeah, in the good old days, you know, maybe it was people like Martin Luther King who were being aided, but now we know it's not that way. It's white supremacists. It's unite the right. Even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan a couple of years ago famously said, you know, free speech, the First Amendment is being weaponized to oppress people who lack power. If you're a historian, John, bring it forward to the present, please. Well, well, you know, I think there has been something that switched. I do think in a way it's generational, although Justice Kagan isn't young anymore, but I think that we've lost sight of the radical potential of free speech. You know, free speech is now, it's like Sandra Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, right? You'll hear people say this thing about free speech. And those are people that haven't really thought much about, like those women suffragists that we just saw in Cigny's cartoon. I mean, come on, look at this panel right here. We've got the first female director of the ACLU, the most important free speech organization in the history of the United States and the world, and we've got the first woman to win the Pulitzer for Cartooning. How far would women rights have gotten without free speech? The answer isn't nowhere, right? We wouldn't be here in this configuration without free speech, without the people that exercise free speech to challenge sexism and other kinds of gender discrimination. And I think we just need to look outside of our moment. Look, at one level, Justice Kagan is right. Sure, we awful people have and continue to, you know, embrace and, yes, weaponize free speech. And for anyone who wants to read more about that, read Nadine Sturgeon's book about hate. And he's very explicit about it. There's no reason to deny it. There are no cartoons in it. It's a great book, nevertheless, even without cartoons. But to me, the point of that book is we shouldn't try to pretend or wish away the presence of hate. It's a part of us and a part of our lives and, indeed, a part of our speech. But the answer to it is not to create some grand pruba, either a university president, you know, or, you know, a tech company guru who's going to then tell us what's hateful and what isn't. That isn't the way democracy works. It's not the way America works. We can't do it. Give me another argument that is constantly being made against the robust free speech that you and John are advocating so effectively. But a strong counter argument, which John alluded to, is heard or harmed. But I know from critics that they'll say, no, those words are trivializing. I mean, we really feel deep, psychic, emotional trauma. And there are even physiological implications, manifestations. And by the way, there are free speech problems, too, because this hurtful, traumatizing, insulting speech that denies our humanity silences us and chills our free speech. So if you really cared about free speech for everybody, especially the oppressed, why are you making fun? You know, Sidney, how dare you create an image of the prophet? Don't you know how hurtful and traumatizing that is to Muslims around the world? How do you answer that? Well, first of all, a cartoon can't blow anybody up or decapitate anybody. It is just an idea. And it is a way of reframing the argument. I think that, I mean, the Danish cartoonist's controversy is kind of a good example. The Danish Imam who really started, who was offended and went and really tried to get support in other countries and, you know, it ended up being riots in Pakistan with people killed. Later, it sort of just left. He was appalled by what had been unleashed by that fury. And I think the editor of the paper also might have, you know, learned lessons from how, you know, how that everything was set off. But I just have to back the cartoonist for being able to say, look, you know, there is a conflict here. There is a conflict between the with certain values that have, that are sort of new in our country. And but that's not the end of the conversation. You know, it's a conversation. It's not a one side says something and that's the end of it. The other thing, yeah, the other thing that I'd add there on this subject, you know, and I think the Danish cartoon episode, it's a good example is, to me, it really embodies the condescension that lurks within so many of these calls for censorship, right? They're always offered in a protective idiom, right? It's like, oh, you know, those sensitive Muslims, we have to protect them. But what are you really saying about them? Right? If you're saying that we need to withdraw this image, signes or anybody else that's from the public public sphere, I think you're saying in some ways that they're less than human, that they can't exert the same kind of self-control that the rest of us can. And again, this is all in the guise of saying, like, you know, how you're so down with Muslim people. To me, it's insulting, which isn't to say that it could be censored, obviously, right? But it's just, to me, there's a real tension and irony there. That was actually one of the points of Fleming Rose, the Gillens post-in editor, one of the reasons why he felt that was completely appropriate to solicit those cartoons. It was a way of showing that these people are not only fully human, they are fully Danish. And it is part of our tradition in this country and at this newspaper to make fun of every religion, including whatever, you know, Protestantism or whatever the predominant religion is there. Well, just one point on that. When they first were published and before the outrage happened, several newspapers in the United States published them just as news articles. You know, no big deal. The Austin Statesman American and one of the Denver papers, and there was no controversy because people didn't know they were supposed to be outraged. But then when the controversy started, none of our major papers would publish them. I can't even say this word right, but pucillaneous response of like the New York Times saying, well, you know, we're just not going to show them. We're not going to show our readers the supposedly the smartest, best, greatest readership in the entire world couldn't take and and process the fact that these were drawings on paper. Well, doesn't the New York Times completely decided to abandon all editorial cartoons, at least in its overseas editions? Oh, don't get me started on that. But needless to say, even if they were hiring cartoonists, I wouldn't be one of them. But they used to run a roundup of cartoons in their Sunday paper, and it was very, very popular, and that was a range of points of view. And now they've even they even got rid of that. So this is a topic that you had alluded to earlier, Sydney, a cancel culture, right? It's true, government officials are still censoring speech as in the case now pending in the Supreme Court. But we have a tremendous problem of self-censorship, not only among supposedly fearless newspaper editors, but also among students and teachers, which I think is a very serious problem. Well, I'm not a student or a teacher, but I think Jonathan spoke to that about, you know, that a free speech protects kids, but you got to get out and exercise your your rights. I mean, it's it's good for your muscle memory to remember that we have conversations and they can get animated and heated. But as you know, one of the one of the problems that seems to me right now is, you know, you look at the NBC or the CNN news on one side and the Fox News on the other, and it's like they all are talking to themselves, and we need a little cry. Let's have some more Yale fests. I'm happy. Sydney, you're a Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist. John, what do you say to a 13-year-old kid who doesn't want to be ostracized by her classmates for saying something that's unpopular? She doesn't want to be falsely accused of being a racist or some other kind of. Look, look, I the first thing I do is say I get it, and this is not just, and I mean, it's not a gratuitous example, because this happened to me at the University of Pennsylvania after 2016 election. You know, Trump voters came out to me in my office with Borscha. And you know, I would always say, look, I I'm glad you're telling me I really wish you'd say this in class, because to Sydney's point, I think we'd learn more. This is really a cultural and educational question to me. You know, if we're self-censoring, if we're biting our tongues, we're not learning from each other in ways that we could. And often they would say, look, it's easier for you to say, buddy. You know, you're not going to have to face the wrath that I would, and they're not entirely wrong. I mean, at Brinmore College, near where I teach, you may recall there was a student that posted something on the net in 2016 saying, hey, there's a Trump rally in Westchester with anyone going, and could I get a ride? And she was so vilified by other students, including with physical threats, and called the worst kinds of names that he dropped out of Brinmore. So, you know, this is a huge problem. I think it's a problem that's bipartisan. I don't want anyone to think that it's only people on the left doing the cancelling. I mean, look at all these state legislatures that are saying that, you know, schools can't teach the 1619 project. What is that if not a cancel culture and it's brought to you by Republicans? Look at Liz Cheney. She got canceled pretty bad. Entirely by Republicans. How can we encourage young people to risk the censor, censure of their peers and of their teachers, by the way. We've seen some incidents, unfortunately, where teachers are not standing up for unpopular viewpoints. They're not all like you, John. Well, look, I mean, I think this is where the history piece becomes so important. You know, recognizing that almost everybody that we've been taught to celebrate and appropriately as, you know, a tribune of social justice was also a great tribune of free speech right up to Mary Beth Tinker. And I should tell you that after Mary Beth came to my class, I mean, I did see a difference in the way that the students related to this question. Because, you know, I do think history can inspire as well as inform. And when you read about figures like Mary Beth Tinker or Margaret Sanger, you know, and what they risked by raising their voices, I think it can inspire you to raise yours. Okay, well, that's I'm getting some questions from the audience and believing in audience free speech. I would like to turn to the first one I see of those. Is there a place where the right to free speech is rightfully curtailed, like when it incites violence? Sure, look, I mean, Nadine is the expert on this, not me, but no right is absolute, right? You can't call up the White House and say you're going to murder the President, right? Or to take like a more obvious example from higher ed, you know, I couldn't say to a student, I'd like the sweater you're wearing and if you wear it again on Tuesday, I'll give you an A, right? Is that a limit on my speech? Well, of course it is. And by the way, one that I'm very happy to accept. Most forms of sexual harassment are verbal, right? And they're illegal. So obviously there are limits on things that we can say, but I think it's really important to go back to Tinker in the school case, that if an institution, especially a public institution, wants to limit speech, the burden should be on that institution to show why it's absolutely necessary to do so. And that's what Tinker said, by the way, Tinker did not say that the kids can say whatever they want at all times, right? A kid can't stand up in the middle of math class and start calling their teacher a racial or sexual slur, right? Tinker did not say you can say whatever you want. What Tinker said is that if the school wants to restrain you, the school has to show that what you were saying created a material and substantial disruption to learning. So that's a really good example for me about a kind of, I think, very reasonable women. And again, we can argue and discuss about where those limits should be and none of this is easy, right? You know, a kid wearing the part of the Bible that some people, and then I said some people, think interdites homosexuality or gay behavior, right? Should they be able to wear that passage in school? Well, will that disrupt somebody's learning? Again, there are hard calls in there, but I think the larger point is that the burden has to be on the institution, all right? None of the speaker to show that, you know, this is center risk that you can't say it in this environment. You also alluded, John, to the fact that all of us as professionals and as human beings engage in appropriate self-censorship, right? Just because we have the right to say something doesn't mean that we always say it. And in that theme, Sydney, I wanted to ask you if you have any constraints, self-imposed topics or people that you would not include in your cartoons. And here I'm going to quote something that was often said by the detractors of the Danish cartoons, including people that I used to think of as supporting free speech saying, oh, but those cartoons were punching down. And it's not fair or appropriate to punch down. Well, first of all, it was at a time when people were being beheaded and burned in cages. And there was fairly dramatic behavior that I think people were repelled by that was done in the name of the Muslim religion. And I don't think that was, by any means, it should be taken as the whole religion. But it was part of what was happening in the history of the time. Yeah, there are things that I didn't do and making fun gratuitously, making fun of any religion, was one of them. I wouldn't just go out and do a cartoon about a Muslim or a Catholic or anybody else. And I also, to the first cartoon that I showed about from Martin Luther, I worked for a family newspaper. I didn't do nudity. I didn't do sex. There were sort of kind of informal standards. And the reason I didn't do them would be that they would detract from the point of the cartoon. People would just get upset by the fact that there was nudity. And likewise, I wouldn't I wouldn't include a religious figure gratuitously if it wasn't out something that had to do. It just, I didn't go around picking on cripples. Right, right. And I'm in decency. Yeah, I would just add, anybody who knows Sigmy Wilkinson or any of her worked for the past four decades, they'll see, she doesn't do any of this gratuitously. She's not trying to offend anybody. But sometimes she will. Right, just by virtue of the fact that she's dealing with important and emotional, political and cultural questions. And I think the real question for all of us is, when people are upset, do you concede to that? And also I'd add, in the case of the Muslim cartoons, do you concede to their bullying and their violent threats? So for me as an American historian, the best analogy to this dispute is there's this really interesting juncture during the civil rights movement in the 1960s where there's a civil rights demonstration and Peter Paul and Mary and Harry Bellafonte are there. And at one point, Harry Bellafonte gives a peck on the cheek to Mary Travers of Peter Paul and Mary. And immediately in the southern part of the United States, the networks cut away. Why? Because they said people are going to be upset. White people in the South are going to be upset at the idea of a black person and white person kissing. Now, were they correct in that affirmation? They were. And there were plenty of people that were upset. But that's my point. Are you going to concede to people's big trip? And that's what they did and that's what's reprehensible. They weren't wrong about the upset. They were exactly right. Well put. So here's another question that I think is for you, Sydney. Do you feel memes are the new cartooning? Good question. And yes, actually, I think they are. It's democratized political cartooning. What they lack is drawing. But they do the same thing. They make immediate and pointed and funny remarks about almost instantaneously. I mean, much faster than I could draw a cartoon even if I was drawing the image that the meme had. And the other reason that they're so ubiquitous is obviously they're using today's medium. I draw. My history was drawing pen on paper and it was printed in paper. That is over, over, over. Even though I just don't think that editorial cartoons, the traditional ones, have the same impact as they do when you open a page and see it on your table in front of you. And memes, well, I mean, they stick around because paper sticks around where as a meme is gone and then there's another one or a funny tweet. And I mean, that's why people love them. They really, they're like, they're refreshing during the day to take your mind off stuff and make you laugh and make you think. So yeah, I regretfully can see that memes are, you know, they have their place in political discussion. Okay, next audience question. Why is free speech under threat in America? I thought the first amendment protected it. Professor. It's always under threat. I mean, that's really the theme of the book. So, you know, we have these four chapters where we say, you know, free speech allows you to criticize your leaders and it allows minorities to challenge their oppression and it allows you to, you know, consume the art and the literature in the film you'd like and it allows students and teachers to speak in school. But it's allows because all of these things have been observed in the breach. That's the point. Right. It should allow it. Right. Of course it should. But it never really has, you know, America is a work in progress. It is always incomplete, you know, and as delighted as I am to be doing this panel, quote, at the National Archives, we're not at the National Archives, we're on Zoom. But if we were at the National Archives, we would be in the presence of those documents. And the reason that I think we worship those documents is not because we've attained the ideals in them. It's rather because we're struggling to do that. We are imperfect, like all human beings. We move in fits and starts. We're blindered and blinkered and imperfect. And that's precisely why we need to study the history and we have to continue the struggle because, ironically, we're never actually going to get there. And if I can put on my common law professor hat and also my ACL, leader hat, no portion of the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, is self-enforcing. For most of our nation's history, all of these wonderful promises of liberty lay around completely unfulfilled and constantly violated in practice, which is why the ACLU was formed more than a century ago, the NAACP before that. And even when you win a case in the Supreme Court that enforces the First Amendment, such as the Tinker case, that doesn't automatically mean that every school teacher in every school district around the country even knows about it, let alone is actually enforcing it. Yeah, I mean, I should tell you that my students, including some extremely well-informed students, were often shocked to discover that the Vietnam War was really the first national conflict that we had, where the courts consistently upheld the rights of people to protest it. And that was in my lifetime, and appearance is not withstanding, I'm not that old. All of this is really recent, and that's precisely why we got to be so protective of it. It's really, so during the Vietnam War, a guy named Cohen, he walks into a post office wearing a jacket. He was a college student. College student, yeah, a college student, yeah, saying F the draft. And he was arrested. And ultimately the court said that he could, in fact, wear that jacket. But by that time, I'm in middle school. I mean, it's not that long ago. And that's really, and there were other cases where people were arrested for wearing an American flag on their jeans as a anti-war protest thing. People arrested for a play in which people made fun of soldiers. This is all during the Vietnam era. And the fact that they were arrested shows that people still, plenty of people in authority, still believe that you didn't have the right to criticize the war. So if you've ever been to an anti-war protest, thank Cohen, you know, and thank the other people that laid down the line and sometimes their lives so that you have the right to say what's on your mind. And what I find extraordinary is the number of young people, Mary Beth Tinker being a classic example, but who come to the ACLU and other organizations and stand up first of all, stand up for their rights that means they have to defy teachers and principals. And I remember one case, the ACLU won recently for a student who refused to salute the American flag. She was an African American student in Connecticut. And she said, I don't want to because I don't believe that we have liberty and justice for all. We have too much racism in this country. And she was actually punished, which is not only violative of the First Amendment, but also a very old Supreme Court decision enforcing it. And we had to go to court. Ultimately, of course, we won. And I will never forget the judge lectured the school. He said, you're supposed to be teaching her about civics, not the other way around. So I think one of the messages to the young people who I hope are all going to read your book is that they are never too young to know about their rights, to stand up for them. They can accomplish a lot on their own, but they have a lot of allies including the ACLU. Sydney, can I just share my screen for that to illustrate that last point? Please. And share. Just illustrate the last point. That's also from our book. That's Colin Kaepernick. So you don't have to just stand up for your rights. You can kneel for them as well. And it does take, it takes a lot of courage, as we said, to stand up against authority. In today's cancel culture climate, I think students tend to be more afraid of their peers than of their authority figures. Definitely. And there's a big, survey literature now showing that. I know, Nadine, you're on the board of fire, but fire did this incredibly sponsored, this incredibly extensive survey of college students and found that, you know, college students of every political party, of every race, they're censoring themselves not because they're afraid of me, because again, I'm old, but they're afraid of their peers. You know, and I think the peer effect is extremely strong, especially when you're young. You know, when I was 18, I really did care a lot about what other 18-year-olds thought. But, you know, I think that's another reason why the people that run these institutions really have to stand up and raise their voices about what a problem that is. And I haven't heard enough of that. So after the fire report, I wanted to see a whole bunch of university presidents to stand up and say, look, this is bad. And what's bad specifically, it's bad that tens of thousands of young people report that they're not saying what they think for fear of being canceled. All right. That's bad because our job is to educate. And that dynamic is uneducational. It inhibits what we can learn from each other. Sorry. We have two minutes left. So I'd like to give John, you were in the middle of a closing statement or could have been. If you can finish that and then I'll give Signey the same opportunity. You know, learn at hand, who's one of my heroes and arguably the most important, you know, jurist that wasn't on the Supreme Court. He said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit that's not too sure of itself. And I think right now, too many of us are too sure of ourselves. And that's why we're trying to stamp out speech because we know it's right. But actually we don't. And the other thing that Lerner had said in the same speech is that, you know, unless liberty lives in the heart of American men and women, he said women too. It's sort of cool in 1944 that, you know, no constitutional law is going to protect it. You know, this isn't just a matter of law. It's really a matter of culture and it's a matter of all of us deciding what sort of society we want to live in. And we've got to protect liberty. If we don't, no politician is going to. Thank you, Signey. Well, he speaks my mind and we are out of time. I just want to thank everyone for tuning in. Go look at them damn pictures and don't be afraid of them. One of our audience members made a great suggestion which I'm going to use as my closing remark and that is that this book would be a perfect graduation gift for everybody who is graduating from kindergarten to middle school and I would say law school and college. That's a brilliant, brilliant remark. Yes. I approve so much. Thank you all. Yes. And thanks to Nadine Strossen for being a great moderator and a little more. Thank you. Thank you. Remember, stay on screen.