Jonathan Zimmerman on The Importance of Free Speech

So she tells her story about getting sent home and eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and becoming what she is, which is this kind of great symbol and also voice for free speech. And the students take it in and they say, look, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight, right? You were fighting the war in Vietnam. This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, like this Ann Coulter jokester, like this Ben Shapiro hoaxer, they just hurt people. Why should we allow them to speak? And she had a very, I think, important and pointed response. She said, listen, at my middle school, there were kids who had fathers and brothers and uncles. They were fighting and some of them dying in Southeast Asia. You don't think they were hurt by this snot-nosed kid wearing this symbol saying that their loved one was risking their life for a lie? Like you don't think that hurt them? Like if that's what you think, like you're not thinking, like, of course it hurt them. So once that becomes like your barometer, your measure of what's going to be allowed as speech, forget Mary Beth Tinker. Forget anything because words do hurt, right? That in part was the point, right? That was the point of the symbol, right? Again, I'm not saying that Mary Beth intended to hurt anybody because I can assure you that she didn't. But what I'm saying is it effectively hurt people, right? Because speech, especially challenging speech does. And the students like take it, they took this in and they said, look, you know, free speech, it's just about who has power and who doesn't, you know? And the people with power, they love to talk about free speech because they've got power. And Mary Beth Tinker is like, hold on, wait a minute. I was a 13-year-old girl. Speech was the only power I had. And that's really our point here, right? Is that, you know, when you start to restrict it in whatever way, formally and informally, right? Even with the best of intentions, it's people without power ultimately they're going to get hurt, you know? It's people at the bottom, they're going to get hurt, right? Because they need speech more than anybody else. Before the 1960s, students had no speech rights that the courts or the Constitution was willing to recognize. So, you know, if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like, they could just send them home, you know? And it's because of Mary Beth Tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that, right? And of course we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed and should you be able to wear a Confederate flag on your t-shirt or, you know, an anti-abortion symbol. And these are all important things to talk about. But even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13, who had no power other than her speech, stood up for her speech, even though, yes, it hurt people, right? Because speech does that. But at the end of the day, you know, that's really the message that I want our young people to get, right? Is that the real reason I think we need to hold on to free speech is we live in an unequal society like all societies are. And we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness, all sorts of injustice like all societies have, all right? And if you want to do anything about that, you got to let everyone talk. That's the only way, the only way to make anything better, to right anything wrong, to right any wrong, is to maintain our free speech. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips, easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app. Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.