america and the people who advanced it. he argues the first amendment right is a basic human right that protects the others and shares his concerns about current attempts to limit free speech in the united states. >> i have a colleague who has called for amending the first amendment, who says it is aggressively individualistic. there are other law professors who say we should trash the constitution. there are books out that say that free speech and the first amendment is the achilles' heel of the united states. so there is this still ongoing debate over what is so revolutionary about that language, and the book tries to answer why. >> jaron is -- jonathan turley with his book indispensable right tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's q&a. you can listen to q&a and all of our podcasts on our free c-span now app.

>> mony, the un security council will meet for a briefing on the israel-palestine confct. councilmembers will get an update on israeli settlements in occupied palestinianerritory as well as the humanitarian situation in gaza. you can see that on c-span, c-span now or online at c-span.org. ♪ peter: jonathan turley, in your book, the indispensable right: free speech in an age of rage, you write, "i happen to like

modern art. however, when it comes to constitutionally -- constitutional law, i am unapologetically rockwellian. once free speech becomes more of an abstraction, it can be banc against other interests in confined to achieve other goals. it is more roscoe than rockwell -- more rothko than rockwell, which can be dangerous." explain. jonathan: the book talks about two paintings by rockwell as an example of this idea of interpretation and how we often have these connoisseurs not just in art but in constitutional law that position themselves as intermediaries to explain language that seems very clear to american citizens. the reason i talk about rockwell is that he was a fascinating

artist because he could paint and a great variety of genres and could paint quite well. he went to the best art schools in the world. but he developed his own genre. there was one interview that struck me where he said i went through the united states and i saw things that were incredibly profound, little things, vignettes, scenes that struck me as being so profound that they were being missed by my contemporaries, and said i wanted to paint that. and he did. he painted a police officer having ice cream with the kid at a counter. it really wasn't just that. an umpire screaming at a player and a manager. it was not just that moment. it was what the moment represented about a people and rockwell wanted to paint it. when it came to free speech, he told the white house he wanted to paint the freedoms that fdr had talked about as we moved

towards world war ii. the first one he painted was free speech and i think many people in the white house were sort of like, what's this? it was this image of this singular guy standing up in a meeting. they sort of expected george washington crossing the delaware, something to put on a war bonds poster, and they said what's this? rockwell so, that's my neighbor, jim eggerton. he went to a meeting in vermont and they were debating building a new school and everyone was in favor of it and then one person stood up, this person, and said, how are we going to pay for it? he was actually the great-great-grandson of a revolutionary hero, but he was now just a small dairy farmer, and he said, you know, i have a dairy farm and i am going to lose it, like many people in this room. we cannot make it until the end of the year. how are we going to pay for this

because i don't want to lose my farm? rockwell was so struck by this moment because of course it is more difficult to use free speech, often, with people who are your friends than with people who are your enemies. it did become the war bonds poster and americans got it immediately. it was a strange poster for its time. it did not have any violent imagery. imager -- imagery, any battleship. it was this one guy. americans understood this is who we are and what we are fighting for. it is that essence that does not need interpretation. it is not simplistic, as some of his critics suggested. it is incredibly profound. i feel the same way about the first amendment. i agree with hugo black who said i believe noble -- no law abridging means no law abridging. it's a clear amendment. what the book talks about is that the first amendment and

what it said about free speech was the most revolutionary part of the american revolution. people have no idea how revolutionary that language is and still is. many of our rights, many of our traditions, come from great britain. the framers liked the legal system in great britain. they just didn't like the governing system. the one thing that was a huge departure, where there was no precedent, was the protection of free speech. the british did not protect free speech and they still do not in my view. the free press is another example of that. but it seemed to just come out of the head of zeus to have this type of language. and people today still find it revolutionary. i have a colleague who has called for amending the first amendment, that says that it is aggressively individualistic. there are other law professors saying we should trash the constitution. there are books out that says that free speech and the first

amendment, according to one michigan law professor, is the achilles' heel of the united states, so there is this still ongoing debate over what is so revolutionary about that language. in the book tries -- and the book tries to answer why, why it is we are still struggling with free speech. peter: before we get too far from that first quote we put up, what is the mark rothko connection to free speech? jonathan: the point is law professors tend to be connoisseurs like the ones i discussed in the history of rockwell, and for them, the first amendment, while many of us view it as clear and robust, they view it as more nuanced. they think it cannot mean just that. it has to mean something more complex, something we will explain to you, that there's trade-offs to be made, balancings to be had. it is more of a rothko, more of

an abstraction we place within contemporary times. that is not my view. that is why i am admittedly quite rockwellian when it comes to free speech. peter: you write that the human brain is hardwired for free expression. jonathan: yes. the book is a little quirky because it goes into not just art but scientific and medical studies. it tries to answer what is free speech. to answer that question, you really have to understand what is being human all about. part of the problem, the reason we struggle with free speech, is we only consider it when we have insular little conflicts. there's much more there. what the book suggests is that free speech is a natural right, that it's a right that the framers believed was given to human beings by god. it is something that makes you

completely human. there's other aspects that suggest it is a human right. studies have shown that if we don't use free speech expression, we physically change. there's parts of our brain that change. studies of prisoners in segregation and explorers cut off from the world, things like the hippocampus shrink when they don't use it. we are hardwired in that sense. what the book asks is before we figure out what free speech is let's try to figure out what being human is and why we need it. you can look at being human in so many ways. but that doesn't help you much in the sense that we have roughly a 98% overlap with the great apes in dna, over 60% with fruit flies, roughly 50% with a banana. does that make us a talking

banana or is there something else that is quintessentially human? the book suggests it is that we are a creative species and we need to project a part of ourselves in the world around us. it is captured in a starving artist. when van gogh was literally starving, someone gave him money to eat, and what did he do? he went out and bought more canvas and paint. survival is considered the most basic of human instincts but you have an individual who is starving and then gets money and goes out and buys more paint and canvas. we have to understand this human impulse and why this is a human right.

so the book challenges people to try to make their own decision on this. that will then change the dynamic of the questions. peter: where did the concept of free speech develop? jonathan: it goes back to ancient athens. they had two different terms for it. they had free speech in the agoura, the marketplace, speaking publicly, and one was speaking privately. early on, you had this distinction between types of speech based on their function. and one of the things the book argues against is what i call functionalism, which is the alternative to the view i am advancing in the book.

functionalism you will recognize from a lot of different opinions. it is when courts say we protect free speech because we need it for democracy. it is good for democracy. that is certainly true but it is more than that. but the whole marketplace of ideas and those concepts are based on this functionalist idea that we support free speech because we need it for these other rights. the problem with that is it allows you to do trade-offs. you can say some speech is not so good for democracy. some speech is bad speech and we can choose between good and bad. it is easier to do that with a functionalist view of free speech. peter: what about the enlightenment? what was its role in free speech? jonathan: i talked about how the enlightenment affected the framers. when john locke described the

creation of sick society -- of society, he talks about the state of nature, but there's a curious thing about the state of nature with locke. unlike philosophers like hobbes, who viewed nature as a sort of brutal, violent place, locke believed humans were fully formed when it came to rights, including rights to property. he believed we would mix our labor with things and make it our own and then those things adhere to us as a divine gift, something that god gave humanity. so locke did not believe rights were created with the creation of the state. rather, the state was there to protect those essential rights of human beings. that appealed to the framers in a very fundamental way. in all their writings you see them talk about, including the declaration of independence,

these gifts of god. these enable rights -- these inalienable rights. when they say it is inalienable they are talking about we are breaking from britain because you have denied something that belongs to us as human beings. free speech was one of those rights that they held closest and we had that moment of clarity at the beginning of the republic and it was lost. it was lost during the adams administration, where john adams became everything he fought against in the revolution. he prosecuted his opponents under the alien and sedition acts. jefferson was better. he pardoned everybody who was convicted under adams, but after all, those were jeffersonians, and then he prosecuted people for sedition. we lost that moment of clarity and defaulted back to that system, back to functionalist theories of free speech, and we

have found ourselves on that slippery slope ever since. peter: what is sedition and what is its connection to the concept of free speech? jonathan: the book talks a lot about sedition and what i referred to as breaking our sedition addiction because, in 1800, james madison wrote a wonderful essay where he talks about these sedition prosecutions that were going on and the ones that already occurred under adams. in the middle of this essay, he used an interesting term. he referred to it as a monster. i kept reading that line over and over again because he's right. it is a monster. it sort of lives within us, within the body politic. we sort of release it every time we are angry or afraid, we release it on our neighbors. that is why the book's subtitle is to free speech -- is free

speech in an age of rage. and in those moments, we release this monster on our neighbors. but sedition goes back to great britain, when the king wanted to prosecute his critics for treason, and even other british courts were very enabling of the british monarchy, it couldn't make this work, so the british judges started to say, look, we cannot say that giving a bawdy joke about the queen in a pub is treason because we cannot fit the elements, so with a crowned it is created a sort of treason-lite, sedition, and created a special forum, which became a speech prosecution forum, and most people know of it. it is called the star chamber. it was originally a speech

prosecution forum handling these sedition cases. so when the united states was formed, many people, like madison, believed we would reject sedition, but we didn't. it was this addiction we could not break. and we have had sedition >> -- sedition-related prosecutions throughout our history, not as many, but even after january 6 we had a handful of sedition cases. we can eliminate sedition from the criminal code. we can do it james madison asked us to and it wouldn't make any difference at all. the funny thing about these sedition prosecutions, even the ones recently about january 6, they are completely superfluous. people are prosecuted under an assortment of different laws that have concurrent sentencing but the anti-sedition charge for the same reason john adams did, because it has this sort of stigma. it punishes you for having dangerous thoughts as opposed to what you did.

and that is what this book argues, that we have to focus on conduct, not content, when we prosecute these cases. peter: james madison, though, was he always a free speech advocate? jonathan: madison had some writings that seemed to go a little in a different way. he does refer to free speech in sort of lockean terms in his writings, but many people don't realize how revolutionary this was, both free speech and free press, because there were no pre-existing rights for them to base it on. in england, free speech was an operative -- was inoperative and free press rights mostly had to do with licensing. so you had very famous cases in which they refused to get that stamp and were prosecuted.

what's fascinating about the first amendment is it is completely new. i mean, there are actually enlightenment writers that talk about natural rights, so it is not new in that sense, but it's new in terms of a government constitution or law, and it is stated in these absolute terms, and i think the reason they do that is because they wanted this revolution to be about the enlightenment. they wanted it to be about individual rights, human rights, and when they thought about what is the central human right, free speech and the right to free religious expression were right up there. peter: so the speakers corner in london, is that connected to the sedition, you know, treason-lite? jonathan: it is funny, because the british have always relied

on a benign monarchy, and it affects many of their laws. for a while, i represented the house of representatives in litigation, and when i went over, i was asked to participate in the 800 anniversary of magna carta. i was asked by the lawyers of the house of commons and house of lords to come and talk about the differences between the countries, particularly in the legislative branch, and i joked afterwards -- it went much longer than any of us into his debated. it was wonderful. we went on about three times longer, at the end of which i said, i can honestly say i understand you less now than i did when i came, and partially it's because everything they said when against the grain for an american scholar -- said went against the grain for an american scholar and that they rely on this sort of

beneficence, this benign motive. even on appropriations, they work with ministries and they do what they need to do and come back and they talk about it. with free speech it is very much like that. they don't have protections for free speech. they rely on what is truly a good tradition. that has come back to haunt them because free speech is in freefall in the united kingdom. it is one of the sort of red light countries for the free speech community. those free-speech groups are really on the ropes. i have talked to many of them. and they are prosecuting people for a wide array of what we would consider protected political speech. peter: isn't there a case in england where a woman was praying outside an abortion clinic and was arrested for silently praying? jonathan: yes, and the officers asked her what are you doing, and she said praying, and

they said, well, that is illegal because you are near an abortion clinic. a lot of people said, wow, that's a thought crime. but they have a lot of cases like that. they had one guy who was a truly grotesque individual who lived with his mom and basically stayed in his room but his room was like a hate fest. every hateful group this guy was grooving on in his room from the kkk to the nazis. and he was prosecuted, but he was prosecuted for his possession of discriminatory, hateful literature, and the judge said, you are being prosecuted for your hateful ideology, what the judge called a toxic ideology. well, that is indeed a thought crime, and it shows how once you are on the slippery slope how there is no place to get footing

and you end up like this judge, who had no problem saying you are being sent to jail for toxic ideologies, thoughts in your head that we find unacceptable. peter: but if that's the case in england and in germany we can talk about as well, isn't that approach supported by the population? the restriction of free speech? jonathan: it is. it is and that is one of the reasons why it is so important to decide what free speech is. if it's a human right, it doesn't matter that the majority want to destroy it. this is an argument made by many europeans, that this is what our public once. we wouldn't feel that way about other rights presumably. the united states constitution is actually a counter majoritarian document. it is there to protect people in the minority because you do not need protection if you are in the majority. you can just have direct democracy. that is what athens tried. everyone celebrates the democracy of athens, which

really lasted only a blink in comparison to the history of governments. it fell apart and became a tyranny because it was unstable. and the framers talked about athens a great deal because they did not want it. they did not want what they viewed as democratic despotism. they did not want a tyranny of the majority. free-speech is an example of that. the fact that everyone wants to silence minorities is nothing new. that's why we need a first amendment. peter: part of the first amendment reads "congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." has that held over the past 250 years? jonathan: it hasn't. and, you know, this book promises an unvarnished history of free speech in america. in our advertising is not quite as good as our -- and our advertising is not quite as good as our record. we have arrested through the ages people by the thousands, unionists, feminists, fascists.

we arrested them all. and it came in times of rage. it came on we were very afraid and very angry and we released that monster that madison talked about. and then we cycle out of it and we sort of get our senses about us, but that is our history. this book talks about the periods and personalities that framed our understanding of free speech and the people who i think are the real heroes. they are now the john adamses or even the thomas jeffersons. there people like charlotte anita whitney. the book's title, the indispensable right, comes from a concurring opinion by one of the great civil libertarians, maybe one -- maybe the best person to ever sit on the supreme court, louis brandeis. he writes that it is

indispensable because all other rights depend on free-speech. it is an amazing passage but you have to remind yourself he was concurring to the upholding of the conviction of whitney. and so whitney was a communist. she was an extraordinarily brave woman. she came from -- she traced her lineage to multiple families on the mayflower. i am not quite sure how. i guess the inbreeding in the united states israel. at least for the founding families. but she was the niece of justice field, who was one of the longest standing justices on the supreme court, would spend summers with him. she went to wellesley with a lot of other privileged women. and they went for a field trip to a settlement in new york and they were supposed to spend just a few days there and she spent months. and what she saw for the first time was poverty and suffering that she never imagined. and, to her credit, she wanted

to do something about it. i disagree with her becoming a communist. i think she was wrong about that but she was right in why she did it. she wanted to stop the suffering. she wanted to do something about it. she ultimately went to california and fought for the right of women to vote and she also fought against lynchings. a day came when she was about to give one of these speeches -- she was a very talented speaker -- and the police came up to her and california and said, if you give another anti-lynching speech, we will arrest you. to bring that point home, they put a police behind her on the stage. and this woman of privilege went up on that stage and she gave exactly that speech. it was an amazingly courageous moment. and they arrested her. and they made it all the way to the supreme court with brandeis and holmes sitting on the cord and they agreed with her conviction -- on the court and

they agree with her conviction. i use that title partially to get people to think here you have these great minds, particularly louis brandeis, talking about the indispensability of free speech, making it totally dispensable. the question is why? how could these people lose their way so significantly? peter: and why did brandeis concur with the conviction? jonathan: i think it is because the hold of functionalism. i think that he viewed free-speech in a functional sense, that it was kiefer democracy, but that meant -- that it was key for democracy, but that meant there could be trade-offs, some things have to be controlled. that is the siren's call that has been used for centuries to corrupt the best of minds, including brandeis. instead of viewing this as a human right, instead of saying what whitney was doing was essential to her, not just to democracy but to her. and that's part of the problem

with being a free speech advocate, is that you often -- i agree with what whitney was saying -- but you often have to deal with people you don't agree with, people like brandenburg, who became the subject of a later case that actually added protections to free-speech, the brandenburg himself was a horrible human being. he hated jews, catholics, immigrants. he hate everyone except brenna bird. no one would claim that what he had to say was of any value to anyone but it had value to him. he is allowed to project the most grotesque image around him and we have a right to respond and argue how grotesque that is. peter: you mentioned oliver wendell holmes. we all i think know about yelling fire in a crowded theater, one of his famous

lines. is that free-speech? jonathan: it's funny because i have a long chapter on oliver wendell holmes and my editors kept calling me saying do we really need a whole chapter on him? of course we do. the question is whether we need a whole book on holmes. the reason i took the time to talk about oliver wendell holmes is not just because you are right, that line is a mantra for the anti-free-speech movement, but i say in the book if you want to know how we lost our way as a country on free-speech, you need to know how oliver wendell holmes lost his way. this was one of the most brilliant individuals ever to grace the court. he was blazingly brilliant and courageous. he served in the civil war and was repeatedly wounded. his father actually saved him from one of those wounds. he was given up for dead. his father taught medicine at

harvard. and there was tension between senior and junior. oliver wendell holmes junior always seemed to be irritated by his father. his father was more of a free-spirited. in fact, when you look at the two of them, i came away liking senior more than junior even though i respect the justice. his father is irresistible. he just wanted to be a poet, and he was a damn good one. in fact, many people consider him to be one of the best american poets of his generation, to the point that he at one point went and sawed the m.d. off the sign on his house. oliver wendell holmes junior was a bit of a tied down guy. his father was almost bohemian.

it was his father who went to a battlefield and retrieved his son and nursed him back and then oliver wendell holmes went back and was wounded again. he was the most unlucky soldier in the history of warfare. every time he walked on a battlefield someone shot him. he doesn't seem to get the hint that maybe he needs a desk job. but what i was really interested in was that i taught free-speech for a long time and i have taught subjects with holmes for a long time and one of the things that always struck me when i was teaching some of his writings was he was different from other positivists. positivists are people who believe that the legitimacy of law is how is it enacted. it is not natural law, natural rights, it is the fact that a democratic system produces those laws. and he was one of the leading cause of -- leading positivists, but it was different. when oliver wendell holmes

talked about natural rights, there's a vehemence, almost an anger about him, that i never understood. and so i spent a lot of time trying to walk back where he developed this. i found it started to develop while he was at harvard. he probably was an atheist as a student at harvard, but i think it was then magnified on the fields of the civil war. when i look at the contents of his kit, one time he was wounded, they listed the contents of his kit, his baggage, and among the books that he took to the battlefield was hobbs' leviathan -- was hobbes' leviathan. of all the books i would not want holmes to take to the civil war, leviathan would be among them. you can imagine him looking at the carnage and saying, yeah, the natural world, the natural restingplace of human beings is

violent and brutish and this is unstoppable until we create a powerful central government. he came away with this view, and it was his undoing in my view. it is how you end up with opinions like buck v. battle, where he signed off on the sterilization of a mentally disabled woman, who turned out not to be. that is part of the fact that he was untethered. he did not believe there were any transcendental rights, things that frame us in those moments.

and say think again. even holmes ultimately, i think, regretted it, because it's the danger of a soundbite. it overwhelmed analysis for everyone. it became the easy

rationalization. you say, it is like you are crying fire in a crowded theater. well, today, that line is heard over and over again, you know? i have testified a lot on free-speech in congress, and before muska took over -- musk took over x, i testified before the judiciary committee, and some members said you have no proof of government control of these organizations. i said i do. it is in my testimony but i admit it is not complete because twitter, facebook, have refused to turn over their files, but we have every indication of that coordination. it's very clear that it's been coordinated. then musk bought twitter and released the files and i was called to testify not long after that in front of the same members and it changed dramatically. the members were no longer denying that there was coordination.

they were now saying of course there is coordination. one of the members, dan goldman from new york, said you know as well as i do you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater. my hair catches on fire every time that line is delivered. i said, you know, congressman, just as a footnote, you realize you are quoting a line from shank of a socialist who was convicted for passing out a flyer that quoted the united states constitution to oppose the draft. is that the case? is that the standard you want to replicate? is that the authority you think we should control? engelman said we don't need a law lecture -- and goldman said we don't need a law lecture. i said, i think you do, because you are the same guy, you are the same voice, you are the same person we have heard throughout history mimicking that line or variations of it, that of course we can silence our neighbors because they are just going to excite others.

they are going to what in the book is called speech that is viewed not just as wrongful as much as dangerous, that you are going to corrupt other individuals. that is the same voice and you are the same guy. and the fact is it doesn't change. many of the people today arguing for censorship are using the same terms. but that is the conceit, right? every generation believes that it is facing problems that no other generation had to face. every generation things that they have a license that other generations don't have. but they really are saying the same thing. peter: jonathan turley, how long have you taught at george washington? what do you teach? jonathan: i was afraid you'd asked me that. i have taught over 30 years and i teach a course on the supreme court and the constitution and also teach torts, which deals

with defamation, and i teach privacy and free speech. peter: what is the definition of a tort? jonathan: it is basically most anything that can happen to you in terms of personal injury, not just by other private individuals but the government, recovery for injury. it's the broadest of fields, which makes it great deal of fun to teach, because you get to teach a lot of these issues. peter: and you teach free-speech as a class? jonathan: i teach it in torts because some of those are free-speech issues, privacy torts, defamation, are free-speech issues, and so we talk about it there. and i do challenge the students to try to define what free-speech is before we define how we protect it. peter: and what are you hearing from your students about free-speech? jonathan: you know, it's interesting, and i am happy to report this, that even though, you know, the students change politically over time, when it comes to free speech, we have

undersold younger people. and that's only become clear in the last two years. i just spoke at the world forum in berlin, germany, and it was an incredibly anti-free-speech conference. there was only two of us from the free-speech community that were speaking. and they were irate, the you was irate -- the eu was irate, about the free-speech jd vance had given in munich. peter: criticizing them. jonathan: criticizing them. i was speaking to someone from germany and disagreeing about free-speech and criticizing europe for eviscerating free-speech. i said i am glad the forum is in berlin because you have been censoring free-speech even before world war ii but in the

most robust way after will ruto. you started with the nazis and are now regulating any comment that is insulting or demeaning to any group. you are resting them all. i finally asked the question i wanted to ask for years, how is it going? right? how is it going for you? because i see all around germany thousands of nazis marching and skinheads. you haven't made a dent in those people. but you did make a dent in your public. a recent poll showed only 17% of germans feel free to speak their mind in public. 17%. so the point that i am trying to raise their and in the book is that if you look historically, no censorship system in history have -- has ever succeeded, not one. it has a perfect failure rate. it has never stopped a single idea or movement. it has a total failure rate.

i question is why do they still do it? why is it all the rage? the answer is because it controls a population. the problem i say in the book is not rage rhetoric. it is state rage. it is when the state uses rage rhetoric to silence other citizens. because the book talks a lot about rage, which is an odd thing. rage is sort of all around us on both sides, republicans and democrats, conservatives and liberals. you see it every day. we have an increase in political violence in this country. but rage is a strange thing because it gives you a license. it allows you to do and say things he would not ordinarily do or say and what people will not admit is that they like it. it is contagious. it is addictive and people like it. in the real danger is when rage

overcomes reason to the point that we let state rage happened, we let -- happen, we let governments to people that they hate, and that is the definition of an age of rage. peter: you said we were born in an age of rage, this country was. have we been without an age of rage in 250 years? jonathan: now, we have. i don't mean to paint our history as entirely dark because i don't believe that. i still do believe the united states is the greatest hope for humanity. i have a book coming out for the two hundred 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence called rage and the republic. the subtitle is the unfinished story of the american revolution. and what that book talks about is that american democracy is unique, but we are unique, and i think americans often forget that, that, yeah, we have a lot of bad periods. de tocqueville talked about this. he talked about how americans seem to be going every direction

at one time. they seem to get from a to z faster than any country on earth still. we have this remarkable ability as a people to correct our wrongs, and during these ages of rage, things have happened that we have awakened, you know? when americans saw mccarthy in the army/navy hearings, for the first time televised, they said no. they said that's not what we are about. so we have this redemptive ability as american citizens that we don't want to forget about, and in the new book, i talk about this frenchman who came to the united states, a wonderful writer, and he wrote an article entitled "what is this american?" and it's an amazingly profound article from this frenchman.

he was actually curious as to this new type of person, not any person that is made up from any particular country, coming from all over the world, different religions, different races, but he says, what is this american? and it is itself a profound question but we often forget how unique we really are. we are a people defined by consent. we decided to join together based not on a commonality of background but on certain values that define us. in my view, certain rights that define us, like free-speech. and so the answer is yes. for much of our history, we have redeemed ourselves. peter: you mentioned that in germany only 17% of the population feels free to speak their mind, share their views. recently, in the last decade in the u.s., haven't we been under a little bit of an intimidation factor as well when it comes to speaking your mind and

free-speech? jonathan: yes, and in fact, polls are showing that there is this chilling effect on speech. it is particularly strong on college campuses. there are two free speech movements i talk about in the modern parts of the book and one came from europe, and it's had a devastating effect in europe. i just met with a lot of free speech groups in berlin and they are all on the ropes. they are up against it. i mean, these are groups that are being prosecuted just for supporting people for free speech. and that wave has reached our shores. it is here now. we also have a homegrown anti-free speech movement. it originally came from higher education. it has now metastasized throughout the system. and you see that on our campuses. it is not just violence anti-free speech groups like antifa, which is primarily an

anti-free speech group -- that is how it defines itself -- but it is also among academics. i am a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to free speech. the fact is that when my book came out, there were four books that came out that criticized free speech and called for major revisions and regression from free speech, and many of these scholars believe that free speech is now dangerous and harmful to who we are. so that movement has in fact gone beyond our campuses. but here's the interesting thing that goes back to your question about young people. it is one of the things i asked someone in berlin who was irish, one of the irish officials. we had a bit of a sharp discussion because ireland is one of the worst countries when it comes to free speech. and i said i don't have to ask

how things are going for you because the irish just -- what happens is that whenever there is a crisis, for example in london, there were riots that were based in part on false statements made on the internet that an individual murdered someone. they were false. very quickly, many people, including myself, said those are false, the things people are saying about this person, an immigrant according to these descriptions, but what the irish should immediately is what governments always do. they said, it's time for a new law. they already have one of the most are coney and anti-free speech laws but they wanted to make it a crime even possession of material that meets these broad definitions of hate speech.

it collapsed but it collapsed because the young people in ireland came out and said no. and it shocked the green party and the far left parties and the majority party in ireland. they were all shocked that suddenly these young people said we want free speech. and we are seeing that now in the united states as well. younger people are showing up now at free speech conferences. they are organizing. and i am happy to see it. i had a debate with one of the people at meta and i asked him the same question of how it was going for meta because meta originally ran this creepy commercial campaign that showed young people celebrating censorship, what they call content moderation, and saying, you know, we are employing content moderation to make the internet better. and they were also excited. and you are like, wow, is that creepy. i asked them, you guys stop the campaign.

why? i think it is because they found that it is hard to get a free people to give up freedom and they found out young people wanted free speech. peter: but is it my indispensable right to go online and write something slanderous about you that is untrue but it gets traction? jonathan: it is not your right in the sense that you can do it without any type of responsibility, and that's a good example to raise, because that's defamation. and even when our country was formed, defamation, slander, libel were all known to the framers, and of course you can do that. the difference is if you go online and say something about me that is untrue and harmful, i am allowed to sue you. you did me harm. yes, it was speech, but it was an active defamation. so often the anti-free speech community likes to say people like turley are wrong because there's lots of crimes committed with speech like fraud and human

trafficking and it's a silly argument because of course you use speech for these crimes but you are prosecuting the crimes. you can actually sue someone for defamation. so the reason you can do that is because you're harming an individual. your conduct is directed at a person or group, so you can do that, and that's one of the reasons why i am happy to say meta seems to be following acts and they are reducing censorship and going back to where we were, which is not a bad place. we always did target child abuse , human trafficking, criminal acts, fraud, defamation. all of that the free speech community have no problem with and it worked fine. it was only in the last decade that different groups said, well, now we want to silence

harmful, hateful types of language. peter: could i go online and say jonathan turley is x, i think that jonathan turley is wrong about everything? jonathan: absolutely and you will find many people do. the fact is people say a lot of things that are false. i don't sue over it but it is sort of funny some of what people say about my background or what i am saying, but that is part of the ticket to the ball. you know, you understand that you have a great privilege in speaking on these issues and part of that is that people will either intentionally mislead or misrepresent what you sent -- mr. reed or misrepresent what you say. people can think whatever they want on my views on free speech or any other issue. people are protected. that is the irony, because i have written columns defending free speech rights of people who have called for me to be fired

and others to be fired in the free speech community. we actually support our anti-free speech colleagues when they get into trouble even though they would not support us according to their same standards. peter: and there's that famous case, i believe, from the 1970's. i talked to nadine strauss and of the aclu about it where the aclu defended the nazis' right to march in skokie, illinois. did i get that right? jonathan: yes, and nadine is a wonderful civil libertarian and an inspiration for young people, i hope, today. that was really the high point of the aclu. i have been critical of them since then because they have adopted anti-free speech positions in my view. they have changed. the book talks about the aclu when it was formed and the funny thing is the aclu was not the free speech defender when it was

created. there was another group of free speech advocates. they were viewed as a moderate group who supported the limitation of speech, particularly on social issues. it was the ultimate functionalist argument. and in some ways i think they are regressing to that position because in the middle of that was the skokie case, and that is when the aclu inspired many of us to become free speech advocates, including myself. i watched that case and i was overwhelmed by the power of that moment. a jewish aclu lawyer standing up and arguing for nazis. it was a moment that few of us will forget. it certainly was the moment that created many of us as free speech advocates. peter: what about misinformation and disinformation?

first, what is the definition, and is that protected free speech? jonathan: there's three. there is misinformation, disinformation and mal information that the biden administration said it was targeting. so these are government agencies saying these are the three areas we are targeting. we are working with academic groups and corporate groups to target. malinformation was my favorite because according to the biden administration, malinformation are facts that are being used in a misleading way. they were saying they could regulate people who were saying true things but using them in a way to mislead people. just sort of think about that for a second. what government has not argued that its critics are using true facts in a misleading way? but that is one of the three categories used to justify targeting of speech. the answer to your question is, yes, they are almost all

protected when you look at what they were regulating. it also shows you the slippery slope again. that is, once they went down this path, they started to ask social media companies to take out jokes and opposing scientific studies because it always misinformation or disinformation or malinformation . and the true costs of that are now becoming apparent. you know, i spoke at the university of chicago a while ago, and in the front row were many of the signers of the barrington declaration, the great barrington declaration. these were scientists who opposed dissenting views on what we should do about the pandemic. it was not just a declaration. many of them also questioned the efficacy of those blue surgical masks, pointing out that the holes in the masks are larger than a virus so they cannot possibly be very effective. questioning the six foot rule as

based on nothing. and keep in mind that rule was the reason we shut down the businesses in the united states, which shut down this economy. they have been largely vindicated. the government has come out to say, for example, many of them were censored for the lab theory, saying that covid came out of a lab, and ostracized and called even racist. now we know that federal agencies were at that time saying they thought that was the more logical explanation, the best explanation. the cdc has admitted that there was not a basis for the six foot rule, that they never had a concrete basis for that. they admitted that they didn't think those masks were particularly effective. all of those people were fired or shunned or thrown off associations. and i asked them after my speech, how many of you have been invited back? not one of them.

so these people's views were vindicated. they were shown, even if you disagree with them, to be credible enough that agencies and others now agree with them, but they are still persona non grata because they broke from the mob, but that >> our close allies in europe did not shut down. catholic schools did not do that. when you look at catholic schools, they are heads and shoulders above other children. they are not experiencing the issues we have seen, they are off the charts in their scores and the same can be said in europe. this has cost us a generation of development for students. >> jonathan turley, you say

while we can lose our appetite for free speech we can never truly lose our taste for it. our faith in fe speech is faith in each other, faithhat we don't have to fearp using -- opposing viewpoints but rather, the inclination to silence others. they may be a bad tendency speech but the worst tendency is found in the effort to protect society from harmful thoughts. the book is called the indispensable right. george washington university law professor jonathan turley is the author. >> thank you so much. ♪ >> all q and day programs are available on our website or as a podcast on c-span now.

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