Name: Jonathan Zimmerman on The Importance of Free Speech
Uploaded: 2021-04-30T17:12:22.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jonathan Zimmerman on The Importance of Free Speech' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Jonathan Zimmerman on The Importance of Free Speech' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
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 great symbol and also voice for
free speech.
And the students take it in and they say, "Look, Miss 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 that 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, you know, your barometer, your measure of what's
going to
be allowed as speech, forget Mary Beth Tinker.
You know, 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, 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 that are going to suffer, you know?
It's people at the bottom that are 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've 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.
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