Voices of Freedom - Interview with Greg Lukianoff & Darpana Sheth

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

Free speech is a bedrock principle that has helped to sustain democracy and catalyze tremendous growth and prosperity in America. At the same time, it’s a right that is often misunderstood or taken for granted. The pervasiveness of technology and increased political polarization has only made free speech issues more complex and often controversial. Greg Lukianoff and Darpana Sheth are our guests on this episode of Voices of Freedom. They discuss the fundamentals of free speech and make the case for why it’s important to protect all speech. Topics Discussed Free speech protections under the First Amendment FIRE’s updated mission and why it chose to expand its focus Why free speech must be preserved on college campuses California’s law to compel professors to adopt certain views and Florida’s law prohibiting professors from expressing certain views How to ensure that books remain protected speech and are age appropriate in school libraries The impact of Section 230 and whether it should be reformed The future of free speech in America Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an attorney, and the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, Freedom From Speech, and FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Most recently, he co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure with Jonathan Haidt. Sheth is an attorney and Vice President of Litigation for FIRE. Darpana joined FIRE after 10 years with the Institute for Justice, where she litigated cutting-edge constitutional cases to protect property rights, economic liberty, and other individual liberties in federal court.

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. The explosion of technology in everyday life has offered more opportunities than ever before to share ideas and viewpoints, but somewhat paradoxically, threats to free speech have never been greater.

Institutions, big institutions such as government and tech, seek greater control over what we see and what we read online. Efforts to shut down speakers on college campuses have become more aggressive, sometimes even violent. Everyday citizens are self-censoring in the workplace, the classroom, even in conversations among family and friends. So is free speech in trouble in our country? With me now are two of America's foremost authorities on the topic, Greg Lukianoff and Darpana Sheth. Greg is an attorney, New York Times bestselling author, and the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, better known as FIRE. Darpana is an attorney and vice president of litigation for FIRE.

She joined FIRE after 10 years with the Institute for Justice, another outstanding organization, where she litigated cutting-edge constitutional cases to protect property rights, economic liberty, and other individual liberties. Greg and Darpana, welcome. It is wonderful to have you. Thanks so much for having us. Thank you. It's great to be here. Let's jump right in, and let's start with a real basic question. And I'll pose the question to both of you. I think it's fair to say that free speech is often misunderstood today. Tell us what

it is and why the founders focused on it in the First Amendment. Who wants to go first? You know, I have a pretty expansive vision of what free speech is. It's at one level almost as simple as it sounds, but it includes the larger sort of sphere of everything from academic freedom to creative expression to, of course, your ability to participate in politics. And in my time at FIRE, I've become aware of more or less a 50 year campaign to, to try to sort of delegitimize the once very, you know, like almost universally agreed upon concept of freedom of speech. And one of the strange arguments I've seen marshaled against it that's become

somewhat popular for one, of course, there's the very popular idea that speech is violence, which I always point out. It's like, that's not a new idea. That's a really old, old, old idea. The idea that speech and violence, which I always point out. It's like, that's not a new idea. That's a really old, old, old idea. The idea that speech and violence are completely distinct was actually one of the great innovations for human peace and progress. But this other weirder argument is it was in Stanley Fish's book, The First, where he argues that we can decide what censorship should look like and how much free speech

people should get once we decide specifically what free speech is for. And I'm like, wow, that gets it entirely backwards. You don't government doesn't get to decide, oh, well, you need free speech for the following three things. You get them for those. It's like, no, it's what you have to justify is censorship, because we consider free speech to be a fundamental human right, a natural right, and that anything you do to take away should be extreme. But unfortunately, a lot of the respect for freedom of speech has been, frankly, quite intentionally undermined for decades now. Darpana? Yeah, I would say that I think the right to free speech boils down to really the right to think as you will and to speak as you think. So it means, you know, the right to express your thoughts, your ideas, opinions, beliefs without fear of censorship or fear of being punished from the government.

And it equally includes, you know, the opposite of that, the right not to speak. So the right not to have the government compel you to speak its own preferred favored message. And I think it's important. I mean, the value itself is important in and of itself as an end and as a means. So, you know, it's an end because the freedom to think and speak is one of the most, you know, as our mission says, essential qualities of liberty. It's an inalienable right that we all have as human beings. But, and this gets to Greg's point, it's also a means. It's, you know, indispensable to both the discovery and spread of truth, and also to being a population that's self-governing, to participating in a democratic republic. You know, we allow a marketplace of ideas and the framers understood that we may test and refine our own thinking, both as individuals and as a country. And that's what free speech is intended to support.

It's without question a founding principle and a big part of the reason that this country has been so exceptional and provided opportunity for so many people for hundreds of years at this point. So we've established that. Tell us more about why each of you decided to dedicate your careers to defending free speech. How'd you get there? My dad is a Russian refugee. So we were fleeing the communists. We were- Tells you a lot. Yeah. And if you grew up in a neighborhood with other first-generation Americans or other

immigrants, nobody who knows anything about the rest of the world takes freedom of speech for granted. I feel like the only people I know who really take freedom of speech for granted are people who haven't traveled more, who haven't, you know, maybe are fifth generation or something like that. That's when you can really start to not fully appreciate how important it is. I also, my mom's British, my dad's Russian, on a sort of a kind of a funnier level. My dad always emphasized a veryussian quality of sort of brutal honesty you know and my mother always emphasized politeness above all other things and it's literally my second earliest memory is christmas when i was four um and there was a um i got the first christmas present i didn't like and and i remember looking at my dad and looking at my mom,

looking at my dad, and I have to be honest and I have to be polite. I had to be honest. I had to be polite. There was no way to do both. So I did what any four-year-old would do. I started crying. And I remember my older sister pointing at me and saying, oh, a little baby doesn't like his gift. He decides to cry. And I wish I had the vocabulary to just shut back. I was like, no, it's my first time I've approached a fundamental societal paradox. For my part, I think I've just always been drawn to constitutional law and public interest litigation. And there's few areas of the law that are just more fundamental to a person's identity than what they think. And it's really important. And I think more recently, I've been really interested in kind of pushing back and

defending the freedom of speech, because there's this increasing trend to believe that freedom of speech is, you know, depends on the message, you know, freedom of speech for me, but not the it's the tendency that it's only you can only defend First Amendment values when somebody agrees with the speaker's message or finds it sympathetic enough. And so I wanted to dedicate my time and talent to pushing back against that trend, because having a commitment to speech that's only for some messages or some speakers, of course, is no commitment at all. And I guess on a personal note, just like intellectually, I think it's interesting because it is just, you know, core principle, a very core principle that applies to so like a varied amount of context. So all

manner of speech that's like limited only by our imagination. You know, you go from cave paintings to computer code. Humans have always expressed our thoughts and ideas in different ways. And I think that challenge of educating courts and policymakers on that evolving technology or evolving areas of expression is something that'll always be interesting. Yeah, I was the weird student who actually went to law school specifically to do First Amendment law. And when I ran out of First Amendment classes at Stanford, I did six credits of independent study on censorship during the Tudor dynasty. And you know what your real passion is when you, and I remember explaining this, the six credit, you know, deep history project that I was doing that was related to Americans' idea of prior restraint. And I had one of my really good friends was like, who is making you do that? And I was like, wait, everybody doesn't love First Amendment as much as I do. So yeah, I put all my eggs in that basket. Everybody was

telling me you can't find a job in that. And thankfully, I've been doing it now for 22, 23 years. Interesting. Your point on taking free speech for granted. I had the opportunity to live and work in the Czech Republic. I lived in Prague. For three years in Prague. And you're absolutely right. You talk to lots of people who very clearly remember the old days when they weren't free to speak their minds. And I actually worry a little bit about the younger generations in a country like that who just don't remember the old days. And they shouldn't.

I mean, it wasn't going on in those days. But it is very top of mind for a good segment of the population in places like the Czech Republic and surrounding countries. Absolutely. I studied in Prague in the mid-90s, and I got to meet a lot of the brave people who stuck their necks out for freedom back in the 70s. And that came with real physical danger and the kind of lessons you'll never forget. People like Havel, for sure. Havel's amazing. So Greg, a year ago, you changed FIRE's name. It used to be the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and now it's Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to, I think, signal a mission that has

become somewhat broader in scope. Why'd you make that change? Well, you know, I started, FIRE was founded in 1999 and I started at FIRE in 2001 as the first legal director. I became president of FIRE in 2005. And that entire time people were coming to us saying, you know, FIRE is an amazing organization. They're so focused and principled. We need to expand beyond just campus. And my reply was always, listen, campus is where the worst censorship is happening. Campus is what happens on campus doesn't stay on campus. It affects the whole rest of the society. So it's good that we're focusing just on that. But I did leave one door opened to the idea, which is if we can get enough coverage in higher education, if we had enough, you know, boots on the ground, so to speak, and we had enough data, and we were able to defend, you know, almost anybody who came

to ask us for help on campus, then we could consider it. But higher education is and always will be central to what we do. So we hit the level where I started to think, okay, maybe we're there. When we started putting together our free speech ranking for schools, once we had a proper research department and could actually go and ask students on campus, what's the atmosphere for freedom of speech? And we could do a genuinely serious, rigorous ranking of free speech on different campuses, that's when I started to think, okay, maybe we can become the foundation for individual rights and expression that goes beyond campus in maybe our 25th anniversary, which would actually be next year. But the thing that sped it up was 2020. 2020 was such a bad year, particularly on campus, but also off campus. I mean, like in the course of a couple of months, multiple journalists left the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on actually on June 6 of 2022.

Great. But but as you say, you're far from abandoning free speech on campus. It continues to be a big part of what you do without question. Darpana, talk to us a little bit about why preserving free speech on campus is just so important. And perhaps talk to us about a case or two that you're working on now. Yes, there's some really exciting news on that. Yeah, I was going to say some big news. Just today we filed a lawsuit challenging, it's a lawsuit on behalf of six community college professors challenging California's new regulations, which essentially force professors to teach and preach the state's view on contentious issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom. And so, for example, under these new regulations, professors have to acknowledge that the idea of colorblindness or, as the state defines, treating individuals as equally as possible

without regard to race, culture, or ethnicity, that that idea of colorblindness perpetuates existing racial inequalities and denies systemic racism. So if you're a professor who doesn't believe that, you're forced to teach that anyway in the classroom. And worst, you're evaluated based on your commitment to that idea in the classroom and how well you're teaching it to your students. Similarly, under the regulations, professors have to reject the idea about merit, that merit is not a neutral measure of achievement or qualification, but instead it's embedded in the ideology of whiteness. And that's a quote from the regulations themselves. So these regulations are just broad in scope.

I mean, they affect more than 54,000 professors and over 2 million students in the California community college system. And they really amount to what's like, I guess, a totalitarian triple whammy. They infringe on academic freedom. They compel professors to teach a very politicized viewpoint that they may not share. And they impose these vague guidelines and then punish professors if they cross those vague guidelines and some kind of arbitrary line of what is required. We're talking about academic freedom, and the only mention of academic freedom in these

regulations is framed as a negative. It's they warn professors not to quote unquote weaponize academic freedom to quote inflict curricular trauma on our students. So this lawsuit, you know, it's obviously very important just in terms of scope of what we're challenging in the California system. It also is the mirror image of a previous lawsuit that we filed in Florida challenging Florida's Stop Woke Act. So there, it was kind of the opposite. The Florida's legislature sought to dictate what views public university professors can express when teaching. And instead, it basically prohibited instruction on eight specific concepts that the legislature determined were woke. So there we got already had a preliminary win.

The federal court blocked enforcement of the Stop Woke Act as applied to higher education institutions, calling it positively dystopian. And right now that case is on appeal to the 11th circuit, um, court of appeals. So we'll see what the 11th circuit says, but fundamentally both of these cases boil down to the idea that, you know, the first amendment does not allow the government to dictate what ideas can be debated in public university classrooms. And whether it's a state like California, that's compelling professors to adopt a certain view of DEI or a state like California that's compelling professors to adopt a certain view of DEI, or a state like Florida that's prohibiting professors from expressing a certain view on woke topics, that is just not allowed, and it's unconstitutional.

And what's interesting here is that this puts me in a kind of funny position, because I believe profoundly. I have a book coming out called Canceling of the American Mind, and I'm also the co-author of a book called Coddling the American Mind. And I believe profoundly. I have a book coming out called Canceling of the American Mind. And I'm also the co-author of a book called Coddling the American Mind. And I believe profoundly that higher education needs serious reform. But rule number one of actually trying to change anything, any system for the better is make sure it passes the legal test first. So I kind of wish like DeSantis had actually asked our opinion on how you actually could reform higher ed in a way that would benefit freedom of speech, academic freedom, all these kind of things, because there are plenty of perfectly constitutional ways you can make the situation much, much better on campus. Who's your plaintiff in the California perspective of, you know, an addict? And then the other professors, the other four professors are in the social sciences, so they're teaching history. But this would be, you know, they would get penalized and punished if they even taught something like Martin Luther King's letters from a Birmingham jail.

Yeah, I really anticipated my next question. And your organization has done a really good job of remaining nonpartisan. You've taken cases that the left would view as favorable to the right and the other way around, and you just talked about that. Let's jump into a particular issue. Both sides of the aisle are trying to claim the moral high ground when it comes to book bans, especially as it pertains to schools, you know, particularly elementary schools, for instance. How do you draw the line between ensuring that books remain a protected form of speech on one hand, but are also age appropriate on the other? How do you thread that needle? The whole book ban discussion has been a

little frustrating for a lot of us. And the first thing I want to be very clear on is that a lot of times people will refer to decisions that state legislatures make to not include books in curricula as if they're book bans. And we simply don't disagree. The state legislature voters actually have a legitimate say in what K-12 teaches. My kids actually go to public schools, so believe me, I believe that very strongly. When it comes to the library issues, there's kind of a hierarchy of concerns. The most serious concerns that we have come when you're talking about private bookstores, and we've seen cases where there actually have been in Virginia, for example, laws passed limiting what private bookstores can sell, sell the kids.

And we're not talking about, like, you know, selling Madonna sex. We're talking about some controversial books here and there, but that are nowhere near the legal definition of obscenity. Those are the cases that concern us the most. The next most concerning cases are the ones in public libraries, because public libraries don't have any, there's no concern that essentially people are forced to be there. That's kind of one of the K-12 library concerns is that, you know, it's incorporated in the curriculum and students attend. And if you're concerned about sort of indoctrination, if you have a library, you end up being like me.

Since I was probably nine, I would just walk down the library by myself and spend a good Sunday there. I wouldn't tell my friends because I didn't want them to know how much of a nerd I was. When it comes to K through 12, the best you can hope for is basically what we refer to as due process for books, that essentially there's a process in place. The best, we borrow from the actually only Supreme Court case that's actually been about a book, like Case 312 library cases called PICO from 1982, 1983, in which they said that you can't force a school to remove books from the shelf simply because you don't like the viewpoint. And we think that's actually a pretty good standard.

But it leaves entirely open the age appropriateness question. And there was something that was treated as a big controversy, for example, in which there was a poem that was read at the inauguration that was in the part of the library that third graders could get it. Someone objected to it and it got moved up to the place where sixth graders could get it. And this was treated as if this was actually like the equivalent of a book ban. And this was very strange because it's kind of like, yeah, I don't even think third graders would have understood this particular thing. So moving it up for more mature readers made sense.

And when it comes to, you know, different decisions that school boards have made saying like this is actually not appropriate for kids under 12, kids under 16, kids under 17. We respect the process and the input of the local school boards, for example. Earlier this month, we actually had a victory against a California college that was censoring campus conservatives. So this is Clovis Community College that had a policy that was banning flyers with, quote, inappropriate or offensive language or themes. And under this policy, the college ordered a student group, so the college chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, to take down their anti-communist

flyers during Freedom Week, and basically because the administrators received complaints that the flyers' content made some people uncomfortable. They also relegated these anti-abortion flyers of the student group to a free speech kiosk that was in a little trafficked area on the outskirts of campus, basically the Siberia campus. And so just earlier this month, on August 3rd, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a preliminary injunction that stopped enforcement of this flyer policy because it's unconstitutionally vague and overbroad. And on the flip side, this case in Texas is still going, but to show the sort of nonpartisan cases that we take, earlier this spring, the president of West Texas A&M abruptly canceled a drag show that was organized by a student group for LGBTQ

students and banned all future drag shows claiming... Let's be clear, this is all adults we're talking about here. Yeah, in student, yeah, in college students. So banned all future drag shows claiming that he would not appear to condone this kind of speech, quote, even when the law of the land required it. So of course we sued asking a federal court to do what the law of the land required it. So, of course, we sued asking a federal court to do what the law of the land requires. You know, and that's the First Amendment, which requires to allow the students to express themselves without fear of censorship. So, you know, FIRE, like the First Amendment itself, is nonpartisan, whether it's, you know, drag shows or conservative messages about anti-communism or anti-woke or pro-DEI, if it's protected, fire will defend it. And I would want to point out, particularly given my family history,

the Clovis Community College, first of all, there's a stereotype. They like to pretend like it's all just sort of like straight white men against everybody else. And all of the students, at least I've seen it at YAF, in this case, are all Latino. And the flyers they were saying, you know, like, shouldn't even just be a conservative message, because they're about the death toll in the various countries of the different communist regimes. That's the main thing they were conveying. And this was treated as if it was like offensive information. It's like, it's also, by the way, true and important that people remember this part of history. Let's talk about technology a little bit. Without question, it's had an impact on free speech. And there's a big debate on something called Section 230, which we could probably spend a whole podcast

on. But, and correct me if I'm wrong, in its most basic terms, it's protecting digital platforms from liability, civil liability, when a third-party user posts on their sites, and it also provides immunity from the removal of content. Protection has allowed free speech and the internet to grow, but on the other hand, some will argue with good reason that companies haven't followed the spirit of Section 230 and have instead used it to undermine free speech. Like I said, this is a full topic unto itself. But for purposes of today, what's FIRE's take on Section 230? Is it a good thing? Does it need to be reformed? 230 is a net boom. I think that it's still good, and we would regret it if it was gone. I think that sometimes, particularly

when I see conservatives thinking that they can reform it in a way that might be better for freedom of speech, I think that they wouldn't like the actual end result. I think that if without 230, you would see overwhelming censorship and all of the biases of the various ISPs would be magnified by 1000. I think it would be a disaster for free speech. However, we took very seriously all the concerns about the amalgamation of power, about how all these handful of billionaires are in charge of the public square. We had very serious discussions about this. And one thing that was interesting

that came out of those discussions was us making a distinction between editorial power of social media that we think that they should be able to so for example facebook decided um to uh to to sort of pull back on a lot of the political content and it's become a little bit more of like a place for sharing my family you know my baby pictures my five and seven year olds you know when they were younger um and that's that's something a social media company you know has has the right to do. What wasn't okay was PayPal about a year ago. They came out with a policy out of the blue saying that anybody who has money with PayPal will be fined $2,500. They will confiscate from your account $2,500 for each incident of misinformation, hate speech, disinformation, etc. in the sole discretion of PayPal. And we're like, okay, hold on. So you're not a forum. You're not a social

media company. You're just a payment processor. And you're actually trying to impose a really serious tax on freedom of speech under the guise of misinformation, disinformation. Now we knew we couldn't beat this in court, but a big part of the new, of the new fire expansion, we're doing a $75 million expansion to, to try to get together as many pro free speech people across the spectrum as possible to deal with cases like this,

because since we weren't, PayPal could do this um and and we wouldn't win in court under the first amendment however um you know a massive letter writing campaign getting together our free speech army which is now up to almost three quarter three quarters of a million and we were hoping to get to one million um they getting uh the paypal very quickly backtracked and like almost adorably that they claimed that oh that was just an accident you know it's like so you accidentally wrote a very clear policy on misinformation disinformation that just happened you know maybe they sent it maybe they implemented it by accident

but certainly it was clear that they intended they were talking about having this policy um so as far as like the discussion of like what the parameters are, I think that people should support 230, but I do think that watching some of these companies, you know, like web hosting apps or payment processors, you know, if they hear of situations in which, you know, non-speech based organizations can actually exercise

tremendous chilling power for free speech, by all means, contact FIRE. Because another thing that makes FIRE different than any other free speech group in the country is we're not just a First Amendment organization. We're a free speech organization. And that means that, yes, we are concerned about, we are most concerned about threats from the government. But when you have private actors, you know, figuring out ways to chill, you know, the

larger American discussion, we're also concerned about that, too. Is there probably anything to add to that? No, I can talk about one of our cases, though, that raised the Section 230. Absolutely. Go for it. So in New York, and this kind of dovetails with the hate speech area. So New York recently enacted a law that was targeting online speech that somewhere somebody finds, quote, humiliating or vilifying toward a particular group based on race, color, or religion, or other protected categories. And the law requires social media platforms or internet websites to monitor that speech and make sure they have policies in place to to monitor it if they find it, quote unquote, hate speech to pull it down.

And so we sued on behalf of blogger Eugene Bollock and a social media platform called Rumble. And after we sued, the federal court halted enforcement of the law, finding it just chilled constitutionally protected expression of social media users. And it's the idea that, you know, this broad category of hate speech, I mean, one, there's a misimpression that hate speech is not protected. Hate speech is protected speech. You know, there's not a separate category that hate speech is unprotected speech. It's only when it crosses the line into about to incite unlawful action or violence where it becomes unprotected. So I think a lot of the governments and officials are using that hate speech language. You know, for example, in this New York case, the law was passed as a reaction to the Buffalo mass shooting where it was the shooting was was uploaded and streamed for, you know, on a live stream for like 20 seconds. And so this was the reaction, you know, an understandable one,

obviously to a tragic shooting, but we need to be careful about, you know, going overboard and like criminalizing large swaths of protected speech to address one very specific instance. Well, and you've got organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center throwing having very vague hate speech policies. We have a case now where there's a high school student suspended for essentially making fun of the principal on social media on his own time at his home using his own phone. And he was suspended for three days, even though the posts, you know, didn't actually cause any disruption. He got a three-day out-of-school suspension. And the administrators were relying on this vague policy they have that prohibits students from embarrassing or discrediting or humiliating other students or staff, which,

you know, basically boils down to what they think is hate speech. And it's really these kind of vague policies that are just so overbroad that it's hard to discern what they mean, and let alone administrators or government officials will use them to essentially censor and shut down speech they don't like. Last question. When we talk about free speech,

we tend to focus on the bad examples. Let's end on a hopeful note. What gives you hope that our country can truly reclaim a culture of free speech? I think the reason why I often refer to myself as a short-term pessimist, long-term optimist. After Coddling the American Mind came out in 2018, both Haidt and I were like, things are going to get worse before they get better. We have a generation of people who learned only bad lessons about freedom of speech who are increasingly taking on positions of power. And that's kind of scary. But one thing that can give you some confidence in the power of freedom of speech is that freedom of speech works really well. It lets you know where your problems are. It lets you figure out what's going on. It lets you solve them. It lets you be creative. It lets you actually,

and it's the only way you have any hope of knowing the world as it actually is. And this is my overall sort of like, I call it does no good. It actually does a lot of a lot of harm because to understand the world as it is, you need to know what people really think. Period. Full stop. And I think institutions that take this seriously, I think companies that take this seriously. that there's a huge advantage in actually having candor and authenticity and all of these things have huge advantages over those who are afraid to, you know, rock the boat or for that matter, afraid to actually look into, you know, possible other explanations

that can actually help things. And I do see the fever is breaking to some degree since 2020 and 2021. We're seeing fewer professors getting canceled. We're seeing university presidents coming out and finally saying some're seeing fewer professors getting canceled. We're seeing university presidents coming out and finally saying some nice things about freedom of speech.

So there is some reason to be hopeful. But one caveat, I worry that just like with the political correctness sort of craze from like 85 to 95, people are going to go like, well, you know, we're not as crazy as we were five years ago. So thank goodness that's over. No, things can improve. And I think things actually probably will improve even a bit more for the state of freedom of speech. But you still have to look at potential serious reform in higher ed. You have to look at ways to and you have to keep fighting for a culture, both a First Amendment law, but almost as importantly, a culture of freedom of speech.

Yes. Darpana? I find optimism, I guess, in two sources. One would be our clients. And the second would be I've been fortunate enough to give some talks since my time at FIRE and just like talking to the youth. So in terms of our clients, they're free speech warriors. You know, they stand up, they're the lone voice of a single voice that stands out that's trying to speak truth to power, whether it's a citizen speaking out at a school board meeting or someone speaking up at a city council meeting, or we have an army veteran who's just

trying to hold the government accountable and have these constitutional literacy tests where he can speak in front of city hall and hold up his God bless America or God bless homeless vet signs. And so I do find a lot of optimism in them that they're strong enough to speak out and they're going to help us change that. Not only the law, which is pretty good, but, you know, bolster and bolster the law in in the courts, but also in the court of public opinion and make that culture of free speech. And then the second source is, is, I guess, our young folk. I've talked to I've done a couple of talks, a couple for the Bradley Foundation, as well as some other organizations.

And there seems to be a real genuine concern about the culture and climate of intolerance out there. And so I'm hopeful and optimistic that the tide is turning. That's great. And a good way to wrap up. Greg Ukianoff and Darpanishev, thanks so much for the great work that FIRE is doing and which each of you individually are doing in the fight, this unending fight for free speech in the United States of America. Appreciate it very much. Thanks for listening to this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us next month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.