Translator: Silvina Katz Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Our absolute right to free speech,
the ability to publicly share ideas,
a right that is absolutely protected by the First Amendment,
is civil society's immune system.
It's not just ideal, it's necessary to ensure a healthy society.
We are more secure, safer and stronger
when any idea or philosophy, however repugnant,
is exposed to sunlight and debate.
Last August, in Charlottesville, Virginia,
a group of self-described White Nationalists,
went marching through the streets waving torches
and shouting slogans associated with Nazis.
Protesters predictably appeared and one of those protesters was murdered,
when a man sympathetic with the White Nationalists,
drove his car into thir crowd.
"Hate speech killed that woman," people said,
ironically excusing the murderer himself.
and my Facebook feed was suddenly filled with my friends on the left
demanding that we water down the First Amendment by outlawing hate speech.
There is one meme in particular that caught my attention
and it went something like this:
Nazism is illegal in Germany,
flying Nazi flags and giving Nazi greetings is illegal in Germany.
So why isn't the KKK unconstitutional here?
Why aren't white hoods and white supremacist propaganda
illegal in America? Why?
Because
Germany is ashamed of its bigotry and America is proud.
Now this, ladies and gentlemen, is ridiculous.
Germany outlaws Nazi speech because on some level,
Germans don't trust themselves.
A society that bans speech
is a society that is so terrified that it can be seduced by evil,
that it tries to hide itself away in a bubble and pretend that bad things,
bad ideas and bad people don't even exist.
Only the timid and the fearful demand that the government, people with guns,
prevent bad ideas from being spoken aloud.
And history is littered with the regrets of people who've had that wish fulfilled.
In America, most of us are so confident in our society's ability to resist evil,
that we're not afraid to hear it spoken aloud
and we are right.
The reason we can be unafraid is because the exposure to offensive ideas,
and more importantly, the ability of other people to refute those ideas,
innoculates us, it makes us stronger and more resistant.
We are going to test that theory today with a couple of people
who are associated with the University of Nevada in Reno.
And we are going to start with this guy.
This is former university student,
Peter Cvetanovich, who was marching with the White Nationalists in Charlottesville.
So, let's share his ideas today: that skin colour matters,
that white people need to march through the streets waving torches,
to stick up for their race.
This, audience, is America.
Is there anybody here who is proud of this guy's bigotry?
Is there anybody here who's suddenly been converted to this repugnant point of view,
simply by having been exposed to it?
Is anybody that weak-willed?
Has this caused anybody to lose control of themselves?
I don't see any cars driving through the crowds, so that's good.
no writhing, no chairs are on fire.
Now, later interviews of this young man show him to be what he is:
pitiable and foolish.
He is only scary in the dark of night when we can't see who and what he actually is.
And his ideas, like all disgusting things,
only grow and thrive in dark, dank, and hidden away places.
There is an online petition to actually get him expelled from school
or to get him fired from his job with the university.
But ladies and gentlemen, we want to see him in the light of day.
We want to hear his ideas put up against better ones.
Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Seeing it, exposing it, examining it, laughing at it,
that's how you make ideas like this lose power.
And that's how an idea like that could take control of the government populous,
of a country like Germany that was afraid,
but it can never happen here as long as we remain proud and confident
of our freedoms.
So then we have this guy,
professional football player Colin Kaepernick,
who is a 2010 graduate of the University of Nevada.
Now, kneeling as he is doing in this picture for the national anthem
is deeply offensive to a lot of people, and I am one of them.
I am a veteran of three military deployments.
It's not anywhere near as disgusting as a White Supremacist
shouting Nazi slogans but there are people out there who think:
"This needs to be shut down,"
that this represents some kind of threat to the republic.
We see this debate come up periodically when politicians,
mostly those on the right, vote for constitutional amendments
which would ban flag burning.
But I think it's a great opportunity to try this experiment again.
So, who in this audience has now been inspired by Mr Kaepernick,
to renounce their patriotism, or to commit treason against the USA?
Is there anybody down for a little armed overthrow of the government
and its institutions?
For those of us who are offended,
still no writhing, I don't see any chairs on fire.
Now, I think that Mr Kaepernick is foolish for this,
this is a guy who didn't even bother to vote in the last presidential election,
nonetheless, he's risen to the top of American society
and made millions of dollars based on his talent and hard work.
He's clearly ignorant of the tens of millions of people worldwide
that American power, both hard and soft, has liberated from the murder of Nazism
and the slavery of international communism.
And I think that it is also ignorant of the good work
Tens of thousands of community police officers do every day in this country.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is self-aggrandising nonsense.
He's not risking anything.
The only thing he did was make himself marginally more relevant
on the back end of a short football career.
But the thing I think is worst of all, is that the way he went about this protest
invited such a push back that actually makes it harder to address
truly legitimate concerns that this protest might otherwise represent.
But banning him?
Hiding him away? Punishing him?
Making him a martyr?
Our country is so strong that it can withstand criticism
both legitimate and illegitimate.
Our country isn't a song or a piece of cloth.
It's an idea. And it's the idea that freedom self perpetuates.
It's the idea that we don't give a politician that we like the power
to shut down the wrong ideas because that means some day
a politician will come along that we don't like and he'll have that same power.
And so, with that in mind, let's do one more experiment.
Who are here today as willing to give president Trump
the power to: A) decide what speech is okay,
and b) the power to punish speech he doesn't think is okay.
Me either.
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen.
(Applause)