Is Free Speech Over in America?

Hey, everybody, welcome back to the Find Out podcast.

We have a great show for you today.

We have a great guest who is joining us,

Ian Rosenberg, who is a First Amendment attorney, also an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, also formerly of ABC News, is joining us today.

And he's also written a book called the Free Speech Handbook, which you should definitely check out as well.

So, Ian, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Great.

Well,

we were sort of joking before we got on that, like, we try to keep this show light, but unfortunately, there have been some disturbing attacks on the First Amendment over the past couple of weeks.

So, Ian, we want to start with the biggest topic of the day, which is

the ABC's firing/slash suspension, I guess, suspension we have to say, of Jimmy Kimmel over some comments that I would argue were not particularly inflammatory.

And, you know, there's some rumblings that the FCC got involved.

Can you, from your outside perspective, give us a little insight into how deep, how disturbing this is?

And then we'll go from there.

Sure.

Well, thanks again for having me, guys.

And, you know, the headline, of course, is that this is tremendously disturbing, not only from a political perspective, but from a First Amendment perspective, which is my area.

I thought I'd start by just cutting through some of the misinformation that's out there, because we have to remember that the First Amendment only applies to government action.

Now, this is something you guys, I'm sure, know,

but is not commonly understood.

Of course, the First Amendment begins, Congress shall make no law abridging, to paraphrase, abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, cutting out some of those other important parts of the First Amendment.

But Congress, which means both Congress now applied to the 14th Amendment and states, but it means government officials, the government themselves, state actors, which can be police figures, it can be school board members, but you need some type of government action.

Private companies have the right to do what they want and they are in no way beholden to the First Amendment.

Very few people know that you really have no sort of freedom of speech at the workplace.

And if your workplace is ABC Entertainment like Jimmy Kimmel, or if your workplace is the NFL like Colin Kaepernick,

these organizations have the right to punish speech.

That doesn't mean it's not violating our First Amendment values.

My wife calls it lawful, but awful.

And that's sort of where we have to start off this analysis.

But it's much more complicated

because FCC chair Brendan Carr, the day before

the firing, or maybe the day of the firing,

said that, you know, to paraphrase what he said on a podcast:

you know, ABC officials can make this have this happen the easy way or the hard way, but they should do the right thing and get rid of Kimmel.

And just as recently as last year, the Supreme Court has ruled in a case called the NRA versus Vulo that

it's a unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court, but written by Justice Sota Mayor.

And what she wrote was that the state actors can use their bully pulpit, they can use their power to persuade, but not punish.

And so in the NRA case, what was happening is New York government officials allegedly were pressuring insurance companies to move away from insuring the NRA and other gun clients.

And the court, although it was at a preliminary stage, and we don't have to get into the technicalities, the court said if those facts were true, that then the New York government had gone too far because they were not just saying we're anti-gun violence or we're pro-gun regulation, but they were encouraging, arguably,

insurance companies to back away.

And it seems like that this is a tremendously analogous situation.

In fact, on a law school exam, exam, it would be too easy because it's just too similar to what the court has just reaffirmed last year, as recently as last year.

And again, all members of the court, even with our conservative, ultra-conservative supermajority that we have on the court right now.

So

what's deeply disturbing and hard to make light of.

despite the fact we're talking about satire,

is that the government should not be able to punish or seek private private actors to punish speech that they disagree with.

So does that mean that Jimmy Kimmel has a case?

Like, is he a plaintiff and he would sue the government or ABC and the government?

How does that work?

Right.

Well,

the ABC element would be a contract matter.

So he wouldn't have a constitutional claim against them.

But you raise an interesting point, whether he could bring what's called the 1983 action, an action to vindicate your constitutional rights against the government.

He could, in theory, bring it against Carr or the FCC.

You know, the procedural elements of that, I think, are both complicated and unlikely.

Kimmel is either going to be reinstated or he's not.

And he'll certainly have a contract fight that he's going to.

you know, win, I think.

But I don't know what his contract details are, but this, even if there's some kind of, you can be fired for cause, it seems to ridiculous to say that this is somehow cause.

But the point that I think that you're making, that's an important one, is yes, that there is a constitutional claim here.

This is not just

two private parties fighting.

This is two private parties fighting with the government trying to intercede.

And that is what they are constitutionally prohibited from doing.

I was reading, I'm not a lawyer, but I have the internet and I'm incredibly smart.

So I'm pretty confident with my takes here.

I'm sure it's going to be correct.

And I'll just say this.

Oh, boy.

Here we go.

Just plus one, everything.

No, I was reading about another case, too, where

the Biden administration was sued for

allegedly censoring social media platforms regarding misinformation around COVID vaccines.

And in this case, they also cited

the Republican Supreme Court, I believe it was this exact Supreme Court, sided with the Biden administration, with Amy Coney Barrett, writing that there was a lack of specific causation findings with respect to any discrete instance of content moderation, which basically means there was no explicit link showing that

the government

took action to specifically punish that individual social media platform for self-censoring, in that case, COVID misinformation, COVID vaccine misinformation.

And so, again, you know, Amy Coney Barrett, I mean,

there's no shortage of options for Supreme Court justices to be hypocrites, but it is much more difficult to be a hypocrite as a Supreme Court justice when you are invalidating a past majority opinion that you contributed to, because then that becomes the case law, right, of the land

until you flip again.

Absolutely.

And as you are alluding to, this court is not afraid to overturn precedent.

You know, you know, that's how they eliminated the constitutional right to abortion.

But it is much harder to overturn precedent that you are directly a part of.

And one of, if we're looking for silver linings or brighter spots to focus on, one of the issues that we can have some hope, I think, about the First Amendment is that the First Amendment has always appealed to people on sort of all sides of the political spectrum.

So Chief Justice Rehnquiz considers himself the foremost defender, has written that he considers himself the foremost defender of the First Amendment.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration, but because he goes different ways, but he cares deeply about the First Amendment.

That is absolutely true.

Even the most conservative members on the court will say that they do.

And so, and you know, and for such a long time, we had the right saying that it was the left who cared too much about feelings and wanted to restrict speech, and that was constitutionally not allowed.

And now we have this flip where it's the right who seems to all of a sudden have become snowflakes and can't take a joke

and is now saying, oh, maybe we can restrict speech,

but the power of the First Amendment lies in the ability to apply it consistently,

which in general, the court is better about doing that in the first amendment context than they are in many other uh constitutional contexts particularly uh with this new uh six-member supermajority i i saw somebody refer to the the woke right the rise of the woke right and i was like i gotta take a moment to applaud whoever came up with the whoever thought i should just call it the woke right like they are gonna

very much not like being called their own little version of woke, but it's like somebody matched their energy and suddenly they realized that what they've been doing for like 250 years to the you know to the left with the fuck your feelings and everything um

it's a very unpleasant place to be when you feel badly and somebody calls you a piece of shit for it it turns out

well you know uh there's so much um

there's so much uh

double speak going on from the administration.

So just the day before Carr had said that

he implied that ABC needed to do something about Kimmel, just the day before he had actually been criticizing his own administration's Attorney General, Pam Bandi,

for her claims that they were going to be targeting people involving

who engage in hate speech.

And she's misusing what the legal meaning of hate speech is, which we can get into if you want to.

But the point is that Carr himself, the day before, had had said it's pretty clear that the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech and that the FCC and the government is very limited in what they can do in that regard.

And then the next day, he seemingly completely contradicts that.

Well,

he found a way to do it that wasn't making it illegal.

It was manipulating.

Right.

Well, so, you know, again, Sotomayor's line is that you can persuade, which I'm paraphrasing, paraphrasing, but you can persuade but not punish.

And it did seem like he was threatening punishment.

So I'm glad Rich brought this up because there was a whole thing about this about a year ago, maybe two years ago, about the quote-unquote, the Biden administration was limiting free speech on social media platforms.

And as somebody who worked in social media and the federal government, and yes, did have contacts with social media companies, there is a very, very big difference between the federal government telling social media companies when there is questionable material on their site and forcing them to deal with it, which the Biden administration did not do.

Correct?

I mean, that was what the court said.

It sort of was tossed out on procedural grounds.

And I don't know the facts of that case so well,

but the outcome is what you've all been saying, which is, again, there is nothing wrong with the Biden administration saying, here here are the facts on COVID, vaccines are safe.

We encourage you to promote this point of view online, which happens to be also truth.

But even if it wasn't truth, there's nothing wrong with them pushing an opinion point of view without threat of sanctions.

I would argue that there's even,

despite the fact that he is the president of the United States, that Trump sort of just railing against comedians is not in and of itself enough to create state action.

That's a tougher call,

but that's a more complicated case.

But here we don't have, to get into the harder case, we have the chair of the FCC directly addressing the issue about this specific instance and implicitly threatening government action.

To me, that makes up a state action case, and it seems actually stronger perhaps than the NRA versus Bulow case.

So,

you know, this is not a case or this is not a situation where we had

the Biden administration doing one thing and getting away with it, you know, allegedly, and then the Trump administration trying to do something similar.

I do think there's a big distinction between

Biden and social media policy regarding health issues and what we have here with Kimmel.

Also because

Something I would also like to get into is that satire is constitutionally protected.

We don't, you know, this is not again something that we have to dig back into the mists of time or just it seems like it should be true, but who knows if it is.

The Supreme Court as recently as the late 80s in a crazy case involving Hustler versus Falwell,

where Larry Flint had a parody ad attacking Jerry Falwell, the minister and founder of the Moral Majority, the political Christian right organization, had this really outrageous ad that was riffing on Kampari, telling us about your first time ads, which were a real set of ads, but then they did a parody one with Falwell.

Oh, and the double entre was you were talking the first time you had Kampari, but in fact it sounded like the first time you were having sex.

In the Falwell ad that Flint had published,

they said that

Jerry Falwell had sex for the first time in a drunken stupor with his mother in an outhouse.

And that's the part that feels comfortable about tormenting.

This is the 80s, right?

You say this is the 80s?

Worse than that.

And it goes up to the Supreme Court.

So Falwell sues as a political move, one could argue, but he sues

had a financial issue.

He sues for essentially emotional distress.

It wins at a trial, a sort of mixed verdict at trial, but wins at trial.

It goes up to the Supreme Court and Chief Justice Rehnquist, no liberal fan of the media here, previously considered the most conservative Chief Justice in the modern era.

Now that's maybe debatable with Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts, but Chief Justice Rehnquist affirms the right to satire, upholds Flynn, basically Flynn's right to publish this parody, basically holding his nose and saying that if we could get rid of this type of, you know, he doesn't even want to call it comedy, but if we could get rid of this type of satire, we wouldn't be worse as a society.

But in fact, there's no way that outrageousness can work as a standard.

That will just punish views that people don't like.

And without that, we would have no political cartoons.

That's his big concern, is sort of promoting,

keeping

political cartoons protected, perhaps old-fashioned, even in the late 80s.

But this is why in my book, Free Speech Handbook, I have a whole chapter on when Trump used to rail about Saturday Night Live, he's the only president to ever be on the show twice, but when they're attacking him,

he likes to go off on how can this be allowed and shouldn't the FCC do something.

And I answer that they can't do something because the Supreme Court has already moved, again, a conservative Supreme Court has already held that satire is absolutely protected.

So these are not just my opinion kind of issues that this should be prohibited or that this is.

These are really conservative members of the Supreme Court answering these questions for us in a very clear-cut and authoritative way that exactly what Jimmy Kimmel is doing,

a much less outrageous and offensive and inaccurate version than what has already been confirmed as being protected.

He is squarely in the protection of the First Amendment once the government is involved.

So just so the people know,

if you want to know more about the Flint thing, there was a movie in the 90s about this, The People versus Larry Flint, which I think was Woody Harrelson and Courtney Love.

Pretty entertaining movie.

It's pretty accurate, too.

Yeah, so you should definitely check it out.

So I want to move to

Brendan Carr, the FCC chair,

who is the guy who

suggested to ABC that their license could be at risk if

they didn't get Kimmel off the air.

Can you give us a little bit, because I know a little bit about this guy, but

give us a little bit of his background.

I'm going to guess that he would not have been your choice for the chair of the FCC.

No, he would not have been my choice.

But, you know, tough calls like that don't come to me.

But

Carr

has been a long time

supporter of President Trump, in and out of office.

And,

you know, he has made no qualms about threatening

media organizations for expressing either, in this case, entertainment opinions or news opinions that he doesn't like.

And

the whole specter of the other late night comedian, it's really amazing that we're in a world now where two

of the biggest four late night comedians are taken off the air for arguably political reasons.

And Carr's

tacit involvement in sort of refusing

to

say, well, first of all, for just

the whole lawsuit against CBS,

which was what was holding up, that brought by President Trump, which was what...

was holding up

arguably Paramount's

other you know economic ventures

is ludicrous.

And the fact that Carr kept focusing on that,

first of all,

the issue, the non-issue, but the non-issue was that CBS and that 60 Minutes had allegedly cut down an interview in an inappropriate way to favor Harris.

First of all, that's what every

broadcast news organization has done from the history of the medium, including Fox News.

Of course, you never show the whole interview.

Very few things are ever just

live in terms of interviews.

There was also no showing that it was edited in any kind of misleading way.

But for Carr to be basically say that this was something that they were looking into at the same time that he dismissed other complaints that had been brought before the FCC when he took over regarding Fox News and their lies in connection with the Dominion,

both litigation and with Trump's false claims that Dominion had been involved in voter fraud or election fraud, the voting systems company.

He dismisses those claims as not worthy of looking into and then says that this non-existent claim against

CBS and Paramount would move forward.

So there is no question, normally that the chair of the FCC is

a a political appointee,

is related to the party in power.

The chair becomes,

changes when another party takes power.

So all that is very straightforward.

But Carr has shown a willingness to go far beyond what any FCC chair has ever done, not only to serve the political interests of his patron, of the president, but to just abandon the FCC's bedrock principles, which is that they can regulate but not censor speech.

And that really the only regulation of speech is in context with indecency during an indecency window.

So that's cursing, essentially.

But to regulate content is unprecedented, and to threaten the regulation of content is also unprecedented, coming from an authority like the FCC chair.

I was just going to say, I got to put a little bit of this on Kimmel.

He

should have known that if he had, instead of, you know, doing this and getting himself in hot water, and now it's all ugly, if he had just put $50,000 in cash into a grocery bag

and carried it and just, you know, delivered it to anyone really in the administration, they probably

would have just been like, oh, yeah, no, that's how we, that's how we do business here.

So it would have been fine.

So, so just so that for people who don't know what Rich is referring to,

Tom Holman, who runs ICE, it came out this weekend that he was actually recorded by two undercover FBI agents accepting a bag full of $50,000 and saying something to the effect of,

you know, I'm sure your contracts can get through or something like that.

And then Pam Bonnie and the DOJ shut it down.

This is not a First Amendment case, so I apologize, Ian, but like,

but it just kind of shows that these people are they're not

they're not adhering to any sort of moral ground or anything like that.

He made no effort to grease the wheels.

I mean, that's just

straight up

corruption.

And then I think the other thing that going back to going back to Brennan Carr for a second, I think all you need to know about Brennan Carr is that the first interview he gave about this was to Benny Johnson.

Now, if you don't know Benny Johnson,

good

Benny Johnson.

I'm glad you don't because he's a miserable human being.

He was a quote-unquote mainstream reporter until he got caught plagiarizing twice at two different places.

And now he makes all kinds of money on the far right.

That's who Brendan Carr.

And from Russia.

And from Russia.

He was one of the people that you heard about last year that received $400,000 per month.

from this shady LLC.

And they all, him and Tim Poole and some other people are like, oh, we didn't know anything about this.

It's like, yeah, I'd never know where my $400,000 a month is coming from.

But that they decided to go to the far edges.

And Benny Johnson, by the way, gave an absolutely insane speech at Charlie Kirk's memorial yesterday, which was

a campaign rally, not a memorial, but that's a different story.

But it's concerning to me that the chair of the FCC, that's his immediate go-to was to go to the far right, which kind of suggests that he doesn't really have a case here of what he's doing.

Yeah, no, so Carr, playing devil's advocate, Carr is going to say that, you know, the media ecosystem needs more,

you know, more diversity, and that's fully consistent with the First Amendment and he's just providing a corrective to the mainstream media being captured by liberal authorities blah blah blah blah but but what I think that your point indicates

is that this administration

is

not only willing to to reach out to organizations or

pundits that they never would before, but to me, more importantly, is that they're willing to basically criticize the mainstream media for telling the truth.

And that is something that Carr has repeatedly,

you know, he's not saying it for telling the truth, he's saying that for the mainstream media for engaging in fake news.

But

that has never been done to have an FCC chair who is railing against the news media in general, basically sort of discounting Fox News and just talking about the rest of the broadcast news or streaming news ecosystem.

So ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN.

And that is, I think, the most telling aspect.

If he was just giving some podcasts to

right-wing organizations or right-wing speakers,

that wouldn't trouble me so greatly.

But what we have here is a situation where the FCC chair seems to think that his role

is to tame the mainstream media.

And what he seems to be meaning by that is to is to repress or to

regulate or to restrict or to kick off

news organizations or entertainment people whose views he doesn't agree with.

Well, he does all that while he tweets on X about how it was Project 2025 the whole time.

Like

he did a whole little, oh man, look at me.

I'm so coy with this meme where somebody's like, yeah, this was in Project 2025 and it was the plan the whole time.

Fucking I believe that Carr wrote the chapter.

He's a co-author on 2025.

Yep.

Oh, yeah, that's great.

File that under N for no fucking shit, Sherlock.

Because it's not a shocker to anybody who is paying attention.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's true.

Well, you know, what, so, you know, we talked a little bit about that Kimmel has a case here.

If he was to sue, like, what, what, what would that look like?

Because can you, I mean, you could sue the federal government, obviously, for financial damages.

If you were advising, which we know you are not, like, what sort of dollar amount are we talking about for him to go after the government for?

Because I've heard massive numbers, but like, who the hell knows?

I'm reading this on social, so I don't know where it's coming from.

But what kind of case does he have?

Well, I mean, you know, one of the things that you people, I think, are maybe starting to realize about these numbers that are being put forth.

It's like when Trump sues the New York Times for $15 billion, that number, which is more than their market cap, some figures more than any kind of estimate of the value,

these numbers are sort of picked out of the air.

He sued the Wall Street Journal regarding their Epstein reporting, claiming that he had given Epstein a body birthday card.

He sued them for $10 billion, I believe.

So, you know, you can write down any number you want in a complaint.

That doesn't mean that it's going to ultimately be upheld by a judge or a jury.

But, you know, his damages are not only the salary that he's losing, but reputational damages that are extraordinary.

But, you know, I do not think if I was his advisor, I wouldn't be advising him.

Oh, the way to vindicate your rights is through

taking this all the way to Supreme Court, because that's a multi-year process that

is not really how most people vindicate their financial rights.

He's going to engage in some kind of contract dispute

with

Disney at large.

And

as much as I'm tremendously sympathetic to Kimmel and believe he's been treated not only unfairly, but unconstitutionally in this regard, I'm not worried for Kimmel.

I mean, I know he will land on his feet, just like I'm not worried for Stephen Colbert.

What I am worried about is a kind of, you know, if they come for these people who have every resource, they have fame, they have reach, they have, you know, vast money, they have good lawyers.

If they can take away the speech rights of these people, this is just the beginning of the end of free speech in this country.

Because

not only because other individuals don't have the right to fight back in that way, but because of the understandable and real chill.

People in the free speech world always talk about a chilling effect, but but nowhere, or probably at no time in our history, has that chilling effect felt more real and understandable.

That metaphor makes sense now.

People are chilled by the actions that are taking place against Kimmel and

Colbert because they know that means that it can happen to them.

And it's not just happening in the arts.

It's happening, of course, in universities.

It's certainly happening in the media lawsuits that I referenced.

It's happening at the Kennedy Center.

It is happening all over.

And

these are not random, unisolated incidents.

It's part of a pattern.

And the

scare, one of the scariest things about it is it doesn't matter if ultimately Kimmel prevails.

If ultimately Kimmel brings a lawsuit and gets fast-tracked and goes to the Supreme Court and he's vindicated, that the harm is already done.

Not only the harm in him being off the air and not being a voice of critique for President Trump, but also just the harm to everyone else.

And so I'm less interested in constitutional remedies for Kimmel than I am about the constitutional rights that are being taken away from us.

What I think is one of the scariest things is just the consolidation of control of the media writ large.

And I'm not talking about just like CBS, ABC, the networks.

I'm talking about social media.

We are

a Substack-first organization here at Find Out.

While the founders of Substack seem to be extremely confident that nothing will ever happen to them, nothing will ever influence them.

And they're trying to lure all of these recently fired journalists who've been targeted by the Trump administration, saying, you can come over to Substack.

And there seems to be this belief for some reason that the Trump-aligned conservative investors behind Substack and those who, some of the same people who are buying the American version of TikTok, that they won't drop the hammer someday and still come after the same people.

I mean, we are small fish compared to Jimmy Kimmel by orders of magnitude.

But I...

I think we're, you know, not far off from being targeted by the Trump administration.

And I don't see a reason that, you know, Hamish McKenzie or any other

executive at Substack is going to be able to fend off

pressure from the FCC or any other regulatory agency as Trump continues to wield it against smaller actors like us.

Because there's nothing that we can do.

If Jimmy Kimmel can't hold on to his job, there's no way that we're going to be able to hold on to our little podcast.

Well, I think you bring up in terms of media consolidation and sort of media interests, I think you bring up a very important point, obviously.

And one of the things that is most troubling

is that

an organization like the New York Times, okay, they can fight the good fight.

They can fight not only for their own reputation,

but for the reputation and continuation of a free press in this country if they're sued by Trump.

But these conglomerates that own multiple interests, even if they have interests in keeping Jimmy Kimmel going forward because it makes money and because his ratings are pretty good, we're, I think, second to Kimmel, I mean, to Colbert,

They have other financial interests.

And once you get into these giant mega deals where they have this is going to be approved by that regulator, it needs to be approved by this regulatory agency or that one, you're seeing that they're not just moving, sort of an economist would say, they're not just moving in connection with the economic interests of one part of their company, ABC Entertainment, wants Kimmel to succeed.

They are looking at their overall economic interests.

And in almost every case,

they are caving without even getting to a fight, even getting to an FCC regulatory action.

You know, Timothy Snyder, the Yale historian who wrote on tyranny, which is unfortunately now more relevant than ever, he has a line that, you know, do not obey in advance.

That's one of his maxims, one of his requests.

And what just keeps happening here over and over again is that people are actually obeying, not with what Trump is demanding of them, not because they lose a court case, not because they're losing a regulatory action, not because there's a law that's being passed that requires them to do something they disagree with, but because they are worried about other things and they're just saying, like, we'll settle.

And to give up a little is really, in this case,

to surrender so much of our rights.

And it's because

these mass companies are just obeying in advance.

And that is what we really have to worry about on the micro and the macro level, I think, in terms of free speech.

Yeah, I think, and just to piggyback on Chris's mention about TikTok, the people that are being mentioned as owning TikTok, the U.S.

version of TikTok, are Larry Allison, who is a right-wing MAGA guy, and Rupert Murdoch, who I don't need to tell you anything about him.

And I think there was somebody else in the mix.

Mark Andreessen.

Mark Andreessen, another guy who used to be a lefty and has now drank the MAGA Kool-Aid,

which is obviously a very, a very bad thing.

But

I'm going to end on a positive.

I'm going to give you one last

question for you, Ian.

But I have been

very

happy to see loud condemnation of this action across the political spectrum.

And I think, like, having folks like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and Ted Cruz agreeing with us for like the first time on something tells us something.

And also, the fact that I think we've seen that Disney has lost somewhere between 3.5 billion and 4 billion in market cap because Americans have stood up and they started canceling their Disney Pluses and their Hulu and stopped watching ABC News.

So

obviously, we are in a very dangerous time for the First Amendment in this country, free speech as a whole.

What makes you hopeful in this moment that we can defeat this?

And what should average everyday people do to make a difference?

Well,

I do see some hope here.

And it's not just that the First Amendment has traditionally been embraced by both conservative intellectuals,

people on the conservative end of the political spectrum, as well as liberals.

And that does give me some hope.

But in my book, Free Speech Handbook, one of the things I talk about is that most of the time, our rights were created, not necessarily by the President of the United States suing the New York Times, like in the Pentagon papers, but by individuals who take small stands of conscience and had no idea that they would end up defining rights for the whole nation.

So we have Mary Beth Tinker, a 14-year-old middle school student during the Vietnam War in Iowa, who wears a black armband to protest casualties on both sides of the war, both Americans and Vietnamese, which was considered a very radical notion in that time in the war when the war was still basically popular.

And she talks about how she had this small moment of courage and then she gets sent to the principal's office and they told her to take off the armband and she did.

But that small moment of courage and the fact that she capitulated under this pressure in that moment didn't take away the fact that we have student speech rights, that students don't give up their right to free speech as they pass through the courthouse gates, as it says in the Tinker decision, because of small acts of conscience by individuals.

That goes to show how fragile our First Amendment rights are, but also

how we really truly can all make a difference.

And in my books, I talk about how Supreme Court cases can sort of answer the questions we have about the meaning of America.

But like with Kimmel, we have things all the time time that are real Supreme Court, real constitutional law issues, First Amendment rights issues that do not ever get to the Supreme Court for lots of reasons.

But they are happening every day in our schools and in our houses of worship and at city council meetings and particularly at school board meetings.

And that is where individuals can really make a difference in protecting our free speech rights.

And I like to say that protecting free speech is a grassroots activity and now people are more than ever needed to be part of the fight.

The first step in that I think is knowing what your rights are.

I hope Free Speech Handbook gives people a guide to understanding how established our First Amendment rights are from the 1920s to

the 2000s.

Because unless you know what your rights are, you're going to be able to let other people take them away from you.

So one, I think to learn about what our rights really are,

and that's what I try and do in a both a non-legal and non-legalese and hopefully not dry way.

I think it's quite entertaining and fascinating.

So learn about your rights and then speak up for them.

And I think too often people have felt that, well, I'm, you know, I'm, as Nat Hentoff used to say, I'm in favor of free speech for me, but not for thee.

We have to, if we are going to protect our rights for liberals or for conservatives or for whomever we want to maybe politically support, we have to be protecting the free speech rights of all Americans.

And that might feel like an idealistic thing to say, that this is the one area in which we should be nonpartisan, but I do believe it can make a difference.

And I do believe that that is the glimmer of hope in our very dark free speech world that we're in right now.

Great.

Well, Ian, thank you very much.

Everybody, go pick up the free speech handbook.

Obviously, like, you know, we greatly appreciate you using your voice and your expertise to shine a light on these issues and letting people know that there are things that they can do about this.

They could purchase your book.

Chris says the Anti-Fascist Book Club, which they should also check out.

And then, since everybody else is getting promotion, I'm going to promote our show for a moment.

So, one of the things, as Chris mentioned, is that we are listener and viewer driven.

So, if you could become a member on Substack for $6 a month, helps us keep the lights on.

Like we said, we're all going full time.

We're going into this.

So you can do that at

findoutpodcast.substack.com.

Also, you'll notice that Chris is wearing a beautiful, beautiful looking pretty good.

Find out.

And actually, so am I.

I have the tree on today.

Both of these shirts.

I have to say to our listeners that I am surprised that this shirt isn't more popular.

I'm the guy who's on the other end of Shopify and I'm watching the charts.

And Newton is a character that I've always loved.

I was a little nerdy kid.

I don't understand why more people aren't wearing their shirt.

I think it's really cool.

You know what, guys?

Prove us wrong.

Go purchase that shirt.

Like I said, that one's in white.

Mine's in black.

There's a whole bunch of options.

We're going to put some sweatshirts in there soon.

Also, as we always tell you, all of it is union-made in America because we live our values here.

And then the only final, the final thing I'm going to push is go follow our YouTube because we are a little afraid that our TikTok TikTok reach is going to go down.

And Luke just sent me a text that said that Oracle, which is Larry Ellison, is going to control the algorithm in the United States, which just came out

about an hour ago, which is not awesome.

But we'll talk more about that later.

So

go to our YouTube channel and subscribe.

So, Ian, thank you very much.

And as always, everybody else, thank you for listening.

And we will be back on Thursday.

Have a great week, everybody.

Thanks, guys.

A pleasure to be on the show.

Yeah.

Thank you.