[ Projector whirring ] ♪♪ -There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you can't take part.

You can't even passively take part.

And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels.

-The most endangered minority in any given community is always the dissident.

-To do anything on campus, you have to go to the Dean's Office.

You have to get approval from them first.

You wanted a reaction.

It got a reaction.

-The impulse to censor has been there since the beginning of time.

All of us, individually, we all want to be censors.

We all want to silence some type of speech.

-If I changed the ending of "Rafiki" and made it more remorseful, then he would give it a rating.

-Homosexuality is not in line with our culture.

It's not good for us.

-I said I would not be changing the ending.

The film was banned.

-The reason why people want to ban books and art is the same reason that they didn't want them produced in the first place.

They felt that they were threatening to the order.

-Collierville schools under fire after pulling books from the school library.

-At our school, there were about 300 books that were pulled off the shelves within the first month of school.

[ Lights click ] -They said, this really wasn't about political motive -- These books contain vulgarity.

-What books are available to children now in schools, families believe, are either age inappropriate or content inappropriate.

-If people could say anything they wanted, write anything they wanted, paint anything they wanted, and if other people could listen and maybe be persuaded, they lost all control.

It was always an issue of control.

Always has been, and still is.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Free speech, it opens our minds to new perspectives.

We find this happening perhaps most powerfully in our schools and in art.

Both teachers and artists open our minds by provoking thought and questions about ourselves and the world around us.

As a lawyer, law professor, and past president of the ACLU, I've recognized that freedom of speech is essential for both academic inquiry and artistic exploration.

Throughout history, artists have seen their work destroyed.

They've been jailed, or worse, because their work has been viewed as blasphemous, politically dissident, pornographic, or obscene.

In the U.S., there's been a steady rise of minority voices in the arts.

But half a world away, the struggle lags far behind.

How can an artist combat censorship by an intolerant government?

♪♪ -I think we're optimists as Kenyans.

-[ Speaking Swahili ] -There's an eternal search for hope, the promise of something better.

We're so deeply patriotic.

We truly believe in the beauty of this country.

♪♪ So to be considered anti-Kenyan because I made a film about love in a country whose motto is "Peace, love, and unity"... hit hard.

Uh... Yeah, it really hit hard.

♪♪ -In 2018, director Wanuri Kahiu's film "Rafiki" was banned in Kenya.

-Growing up, when we went to the cinemas, we would watch everybody else fall in love.

You know, we would watch Europeans fall in love, English fall in love, Americans fall in love.

But we never got to see ourselves fall in love.

So I went into "Rafiki" wanting to make sure that there was a story in Kenya's cinematic history that communicated love.

Same-sex relationships are criminalized in Kenya.

And if you're found to be in a same-sex relationship, you can get up to 14 years in prison.

Because we knew that making "Rafiki" could be controversial, we made it legally.

-Maybe because of bureaucracy, things just fell through the cracks.

Maybe they didn't read the script from cover to cover.

All I know is that we got a film permit and we were able to shoot.

While we were editing the film, I started worrying.

-The permit was issued by the Kenya Film Classification Board.

Just a year earlier, its outspoken CEO, Ezekiel Mutua, had banned six cartoons for containing, in his words, "elements that are intended to introduce children to deviant behaviour."

-Homosexuality is not in line with our culture.

It's not good for us.

-When we finally submitted, the head of the Classification Board said, if I changed the ending and made it more remorseful -- and I remember that word -- if I made the ending more remorseful, then he would give it a rating.

After I said I would not be changing the ending, the film was banned.

-Let me take you straight to the lakeside city of Kisumu, where the Kenya Film Classification Board has restricted a local film titled "Rafiki."

-It could not be broadcast, exhibited, distributed, or owned within the Republic of Kenya.

We erased all copies of the film that existed in Kenya, including on my hard drive on my computer.

I don't currently own a copy of "Rafiki."

♪♪ -Censorship is all too familiar to Kenyans.

They spent decades under a single-party government that brutally cracked down on free expression.

Then, in 2010, Kenyans approved a new constitution.

It promised them more freedom than ever before.

[ Cheers and applause ] -In Kenya, to be gay is illegal.

They just want to have equal rights, the same privacy and equality as all other Kenyans do.

-I will not engage in a subject that is of no...

It's, uh -- it is not of any major importance to the people and the Republic of Kenya.

-Here in the United States, there's been a long struggle against censoring LGBTQ perspectives, including in the arts.

But in recent decades, those deeply entrenched negative stereotypes have steadily changed.

-I can tell you that, in the 1980s and 1990s, most people did not want to hear about homosexuality.

They did not want us to tell our stories, because our stories, they thought, were going to undermine the government, bring God's wrath down on America, seduce their children, and just generally lead to the moral collapse of the nation.

Their idea was, even if they didn't hate gay people, their idea was, "Can't you just keep it quiet?

Why do you have to talk about this?

Why do you have to thrust it in our faces?"

[ Man chuckles ] -[ Chuckles ] -"Rafiki" was not the first film made about same-sex relationships.

All films that have been made about same-sex relationships within Kenya have been banned.

A collective of artists and filmmakers called the Nest Collective made a series of vignettes called "Stories of Our Lives" based on real people's experiences that they then fictionalized.

-We went around the country, talked to a whole bunch of queer people, all kinds of identities, all kinds of upbringings, world views, classes.

Here is a queer person who does not have AIDS and is not evil.

It's important for these stories to be told.

-A documentary, "I Am Samuel," follows the life of these wonderful young men in pursuit of love.

[ Keyboard clacking ] -We found out our classification status when, literally, someone sent us a Facebook link.

♪♪ "On the basis of religion as a classifiable element, the board finds the documentary not only blasphemous..." [ Sighs ] "...but also an attempt to use religion to advocate for same-sex marriage."

-Because of that ban, like, so many other people knew about this film.

It was in mainstream news.

Like, you would need, I think, millions of dollars to get that publicity.

-In the meeting that I had with the Kenya Film Classification Board, the head of the Classification Board said himself, "You know, if I ban your film, I'll make you very popular."

Oh, these are the Cannes pictures.

[ Applause ] -It's the first time a Kenyan film has been selected for Cannes.

-It's Cannes!

[ Chuckles ] It's just the most glamorous film festival in the world.

-A few of us went to see "Rafiki" 'cause we thought it was a very important film to see.

I found it incredibly powerful and moving.

I thought the performances, as well as the filmmaking, were extraordinary.

[ Camera shutters clicking ] -Walking down that red carpet in Cannes made me feel like I belong.

♪♪ [ Gear stick clicks, engine rumbles ] After seven years of making a film, I knew I was going to fight for it.

We went to court advocating for freedom of expression and advocating for the ban to be lifted.

But we also had a special ask.

Because we wanted the film to be able to qualify for the Oscars, the rule was the film had to play in a theater for seven days.

So that was our ask.

And the judge agreed.

So, this is where -- the theater where "Rafiki" was screened for seven days, and it was sold out every single day.

♪♪ -For a Kenyan to be doing a film like this was so brave to me, and I was so excited to watch it.

-I see change for sure, and I'm here for the advocacy of change.

-Today, Wanuri and attorney Githu Muigai... -Morning.

-Morning.

Good to see you.

-...are appealing the ban on her film to the Kenyan Supreme Court.

-Do you think that this could possibly change the law?

-I think our case is the best shot ever.

It's a defining moment for what freedom means in this country and in this region.

And when we succeed -- when we succeed -- I think it will bring down so many other unnecessary barriers to artistic freedom.

♪♪ If you try to change the whole world, they will resist, the whole world.

But if you chip a little bit at a time, you make progress.

-Go.

-There is definitely a movement of people making sure that there is no such thing as an unseen Kenyan citizen.

I can't imagine what else art is for, other than being in service of the people.

♪♪ -Stories like "Rafiki" have great power, even the power to soften long-held prejudices.

Changing people's minds is always hard, especially when the new perspectives don't just differ from prevailing norms, but actually attack them.

But, then, we have a time-tested way to make it easier to accept criticism and even insult -- our sense of humor.

The pages of history are littered with tyrants who banned jokes made at their expense.

There's a long tradition of comedians who have spoken truth to power and helped redefine popular culture.

Near the end of the 5th century B.C., the word "parrhesia" was added to the Greek language.

It means "fearless speech."

Around the same time -- no coincidence -- the Greeks laughed at the sharp-tongued satire of the playwright Aristophanes.

-He became the representative, the face, the personification of ancient comedy.

He says the things that we wouldn't dare to say.

He was ruthless, and he was daring.

-In 411 B.C., Aristophanes wrote "Lysistrata," the world's first anti-war play.

-Aristophanes wrote "Lysistrata" during the Peloponnesian War.

Athenian society is divided.

There are those who want the war and those who do not want the war.

Aristophanes takes a position against the war.

He creates a character which is called Lysistrata.

She proposes a crazy plan.

[ Both gasp ] -In "Lysistrata" and other plays, Aristophanes used humor to criticize the hawkish Athenian leader Cleon.

-He is not named, but there are many allusions within the text that everyone in Athens would recognize.

-In an attempt to silence his mockery, Aristophanes was brought to court many times, but to little effect.

-Humor is very important because it provides some space to say something and at the same time say, "I was joking."

-You could say things in satire that you could otherwise never say, because it's about something else, but you know what it's referring to.

-And when you're challenging authority, humor can be much more effective than just a direct challenge because you're pointing out absurdity.

This is why, you know, court jesters existed.

-Humor gives us license to go places where, when we're serious, we can't go.

It gives us license to make fun of ourselves and each other.

-And when you laugh, something in you says, "Oh, that's true."

So you can make... [ Chuckles ] I mean, I make a living doing it a lot.

You can make people laugh at a premise or the punch line to a premise where they really weren't with you on the premise.

And then they might re-examine what they thought about the premise.

Because it's sort of irresistible.

It's like there's something in you -- The part that's laughing is going, "Oh, that must be true.

I laughed at it."

-♪ Boy, the way Glenn Miller played ♪ -Norman Lear always says that before "All in the Family," the biggest problem that someone would have on a sitcom was, "Oh, no, the boss is coming over for dinner, and the roast is ruined!"

And then here comes "All in the Family."

-You are a meathead.

[ Laughter ] -Now you can turn on the TV and you can see people talking about what you talk about at the dinner table, and are fighting about what you fight about.

And you can really empathize with this family.

-I'm a draft dodger.

[ Audience murmurs ] -What did he say?

-He said he was a draft dodger.

[ Laughter ] -They're talking about homosexuality, which they talked about in the fifth episode of the first season.

Talk about daring.

They're talking about race.

-Now, you look at me.

You figure me for a prejudiced guy?

-If you were prejudiced, you'd walk around thinking that you're better than anybody else in the world.

But I can honestly say, having spent these marvelous moments with you, you ain't better than anybody.

[ Laughter ] -CBS, in order to protect themselves, aired a disclaimer before the first episode aired.

It was a way of CBS distancing themselves from the material so that people wouldn't boycott the network forevermore.

And I asked Norman, "What made you take that risk?"

And he always just said -- again, very modestly -- "I wanted this show to talk about real life and reflect real life.

And this is what goes on in real life.

There are gay people.

There are women who want rights.

There are Black people living in your neighborhood or who want to live in your neighborhood and who are being kept from it.

These are stories.

These are story opportunities."

-You're going to find yourself on top of the 10 Most Sorry Honky List.

[ Laughter ] -The best comedy lives on the edge of what is acceptable.

I had my kids with my ex-partner, who doesn't want to be identified.

I'm supposed to call her Wendy, but her real name's Sharon.

So let's just call her Shwendy.

Alright, anyway... [ Laughter ] But I do sometimes feel sorry for my kids 'cause they have two Jewish mothers.

Wouldn't you kill yourself, seriously, at that time?

A joke is a build-up of tension and then a release.

It's a surprise.

And it's powerful.

♪♪ [ Announcer speaking indistinctly ] [ Cheers and applause ] -Ian Fidance!

-I, uh, have a mustache.

You're welcome, sir.

[ Meows ] Uh... [ Laughter ] I think comedy's incredibly important.

The ability to laugh at oneself is very important.

Dude, people comment on my mustache all the time.

It's, like, never anyone I ever wanna talk to.

You know?

It's always a guy exactly like me.

[ Laughter ] -Funny is whatever makes people laugh.

It's subjective.

-It's called a sense of humor.

It's a sense, like taste.

Like, you like salty food, you don't like salty food.

-Today, the limits on what's appropriate in comedy are hotly debated.

After all, comedians' stock-in-trade is provocative commentary on the world around them.

-For someone to say something should never be said, no matter the context, is insane to me.

Just be funny.

Don't use an excuse -- "Oh, you can't say this."

"I can't say that."

"People are too sensitive."

Find a way to make it funny.

Be funny.

And the only way to be funny is to fail.

[ Laughter ] I'm like, dude, if your kid is, like, gay, trans, non-binary, love your kid, support your kid, protect your kid, do whatever you can to take care of your kid.

But, um... [ Chuckles ] ...if you're, like, a parent and you're actively bragging on social media about your, like, non-binary, one-year-old toddler... [ Laughter ] ...well, it's kind of like having a vegan dog, you know?

[ Laughter ] It's like, we all know who's making that decision.

It's not the kid.

-It's the comedian's job to find the line, cross it, and make the audience happy that you did that.

Comedy, by the way -- the only art form where the audience sees a work in progress.

No conductor is, like, in the middle of a concert and like, "What do you think of this key?

Do you think we should ch--" No!

-Lenny Bruce would be impossible today.

And, you know, the comedian is like the fool.

You know, they're the fool and they're the court jester who can say things nobody else would say.

And that's the thing about comedy, that you'll be saying things that are forbidden.

-In the 1960s, comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested multiple times for saying things authorities considered obscene.

-Obscenity has one specific meaning -- to appeal to the prurient interest, to get you horny.

If the word...stimulates you sexually, you're in a lot of trouble.

[ Laughter ] -What is appropriate?

The real question is, who decides what is appropriate?

Is the government going to decide what's appropriate?

Is the dean of the college going to decide what's appropriate?

♪♪ -In recent years, students on college campuses have become hostile toward comedians.

Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock, among others, now refuse to perform at colleges.

-People have the right to be offended.

They don't have the opposite right -- to not be offended.

I think that is being questioned because offense -- "I'm offended" has become an argument for "shut up."

[ Chuckles ] -There was, like, a notable example -- Like, Nimesh Patel was at Columbia, and they canceled his show in the middle of a joke that he was telling.

It had themes about being Black and being gay.

But the whole obvious point of the joke was extremely anti-bigoted and making fun of bigots.

-I was like, "Oh."

[ Laughter ] -It was, like, a small group of kids, and they were able to stop the show.

-Thank you so much.

-Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

-Political correctness is something that started this awareness of how our prejudices are being entrenched within language, within images, and a critical understanding of those.

And that's very important.

But then it becomes a prescriptive ban on addressing certain issues or laughing in certain ways, and it goes too far.

-Any society, of course, has boundaries of what's just too rude to talk about.

And that's how society works.

And it should be.

But if you're asking where we need more space in American society right now, the direction we need to go is not more constraints on things that you are socially allowed to say, tell jokes about.

We need fewer constraints, because without that kind of humor, without that kind of comedy sometimes pushing the boundaries in ways that make us think a little bit harder, without that, I just think we become poorer.

-But when does a performance go too far?

When does art cross the line?

When should it be censored on the ground that it is obscene?

For 100 years, since the Jazz Age, popular music has offended someone somewhere.

Today, in much of the world, music is unbridled.

Songs are written about anything and everything.

Yet, right here in the United States, not too long ago, some government officials targeted certain music as obscene and subject to criminal prosecution, despite the First Amendment.

-The Supreme Court will often adopt a principle, but the actual meaning of the principle in specific situations is left very vague.

For example, if the Supreme Court says obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment, what's obscenity?

-Obscenity has a legal definition, which is that something appeals to the prurient interest in sex -- "prurient" meaning unhealthy interest in sex -- when it's patently offensive by community standards, and the third prong is it has no serious literary, scientific, or political value.

[ Needle scratches ] -♪ Oh, me so horny ♪ ♪ Oh-oh, so, so horny ♪ ♪ Oh, me so horny ♪ ♪ Me love you long time ♪ -The latest chapter in a growing national debate over where, in a democratic society, art ends and obscenity begins, and who should decide?

-♪ So, so horny ♪ ♪ Me so horny ♪ ♪ Me love you long time ♪ -2 Live Crew was the sound out of Miami, Miami bass, which comes out of the ghetto, out of the hood.

It was party music.

You could dance to it.

They saw what was happening in the nightclubs, and they just brought that to mainstream.

They pushed the envelope.

First, it was the album covers.

Kids were excited about it, and then the parents were like, "What is this?"

you know, and these girls with their butts out.

Then they started listening to the lyrics and they realized that, you know, the lyrics were definitely from the street, and that became a problem.

-A Florida jury says the rap group 2 Live Crew can't be as nasty as they wanna be, if they want their records sold in stores.

In what's being called a landmark case, a jury convicted a record-store owner on obscenity charges for selling a 2 Live Crew album.

-Who would ever think that here, in the United States of America, we would be telling grown people what they can purchase and what they can't.

-2 Live Crew went on trial in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Tuesday, charged with singing obscene songs for paying adults during a nightclub performance last June.

-I mean, our lyrics are explicit.

We talk about sex, you know?

And we're an easy target.

-This is the first time that a record has been the center of an obscenity charge with an arrest ordered by a federal judge.

-Why is America so scared to establish boundaries of decency?

-We're trying to get America back to morality, not more immorality.

-Luke and 2 Live Crew became the target for folks that didn't like hip-hop at all.

-Well, I don't even consider this art.

I mean, he's rapping, not singing.

-I'm not totally against music, because it is fun, it has a good beat.

But to Luther, I would be truly embarrassed if I was your daughter.

-Luke turned into a martyr for the whole music industry, and I don't think he gets the credit for it, but he did, you know, and said, like, "Hey, look, I'm standing up for freedom of speech."

[ Cheers and applause ] -2 Live Crew's next record, "Banned in the U.S.A.," was the first album ever to be marked with a parental advisory sticker.

That sticker has since become iconic.

For parents, an easy way to choose which albums they don't want their children to hear.

For children, an easy way to choose which albums they do want to hear.

Should young people be protected from certain music, images, or books?

The wide availability of new and varied ideas, along with the desire to curb them, was greatly impacted by the invention of a specific machine -- the Gutenberg press.

-When Time magazine went through its list of what is the most important invention, the answer was the printing press.

It's the physical machine used to press the printing letters, the type letters, into paper.

Which sounds like something simple, but getting a machine to accomplish that and then be replicated, that's the secret of changing the world.

-It allowed people to have concepts written down and shared and shared and shared.

And that's why, really, the press became so threatening.

-Before that machine came about, with Gutenberg's development and invention, books are written by hand.

That process, a Bible takes three to five years to finish.

Gutenberg was born somewhere around 1398, and around him is swirling the beginnings of the Reformation and the Renaissance, which means there's a demand for more books.

And Gutenberg's approach to that problem wasn't so much, "I need to invent a new technology, a new machine."

His approach was, "I need to write books faster."

Gutenberg creates a process that replicates books in such quantities that the price just keeps dropping.

Within 50 years of Gutenberg, it's hard to imagine how many books were printed -- 12 million books in the first 50 years.

All the books written by hand during Gutenberg's lifetime, by all the scribes in Europe, that number is probably around 20,000.

Now you begin to think about the difference between 20,000 and 12 million.

The world changes.

♪♪ -Once the printing press became available and it became possible to spread concepts, then there was an urge to also suppress the things that are on paper.

And, I mean, one of the really interesting things about any kind of recorded form is that as soon as there's a recorded form, people start using it for sex.

And this is one of the things that certainly threatened the authorities that be, because if you have sexual disruption, you have social disruption.

And so, some of the earliest censorship was not just of concepts, it was of sexual issues.

-There's a growing movement to remove or restrict certain books in libraries, including school libraries.

And, you know, this is hardly America's first brush with book bans.

In 1939, an Illinois library burned "The Grapes of Wrath."

In 1960, a teacher in Oklahoma was fired for assigning "The Catcher in the Rye."

Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," James Joyce's "Ulysses" -- all of these have been censored.

And still more books are being banned today.

-There is talk of banning 16 books in Polk County public schools.

-Activists demanding that the library ban more than 400 books.

-We need an audit of the library for pornographic and sexual content.

-People ban books or seek to ban books or keep them out of libraries or keep them out of the hands of the public because whatever is in there is considered by them to be offensive.

They think that they can somehow solve the world by limiting what knowledge people have.

-And that's why a lot of these things happen in schools, because if the kids see this book, if the kids see this painting, if the kids see -- listen to this music, agh!

Trying to protect the children becomes a very powerful intoxicant.

-Collierville schools under fire after pulling books from the school library.

-At our school -- we go to Collierville High School -- there were about 300 books that were pulled off the shelves within the first month of school, most of them having to do with Black Lives Matter movements and LGBTQ+ communities.

-For the most part, the parents that we work with, they don't look at this as banning books.

What books are available to children now in schools, families believe, are either age inappropriate or content inappropriate, and they have raised questions about that.

More than anything, families want to know what their children have access to and have a little bit of oversight into that process.

-I don't think that anyone should have the power to pull a book off and impact another student's education if they're not your own.

-These two students helped form the Tennessee Youth Coalition to lobby against book-banning legislation in their state.

-The one that we did the most work on was House Bill-Senate Bill 1944, and that prohibits the existence of obscene materials in our classrooms, both classroom libraries and school libraries.

Obscene is something that's going to be different for everybody.

I'm not entirely sure what my own definition is.

Like, I don't have the same beliefs a lot of the time, as my mom, but my education should be up to me and my mom, not like a school-wide decision made by one single person.

-Who has oversight into what books are in a school library that children are reading, have access to, or being assigned as curriculum.

For that to be done by, you know, administrators behind closed doors, I think, is worrisome to people.

And I think with good reason.

-We're not trying to promote inappropriate things.

We're not promoting risky behavior or indoctrinating people.

What we're doing is we're presenting... a global view.

And I think we do students a disservice when we try to narrow that lens.

-So, are there limits on a school's power to ban books?

The Supreme Court addressed that important question for the first and only time in 1982.

-Three members of the Island Trees School Board attend a conference in Upstate New York.

-They learned about books that were being challenged and questioned in other parts of the country, and, on a table, they said they found a list entitled "Objectionable Books."

-They come back from the conference, and two of the school board members persuade the school custodian to open the library, and they go through the card catalog.

-The board removed these 11 books from the school system.

-These were not books that were part of the curriculum that the kids were being required to read.

These were books in the library, in the school library, that kids could take out or not take out as they wish.

These were books like "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut, "The Naked Ape" by Desmond Morris, which was a book on zoology.

-A Native-American love story, two books by Jewish authors.

Half of the books have to do with the greatest Black-American writers.

Why are these books on the list?

-Because they are anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy.

That comes right out of their press release.

[ Projector whirring ] -We had been taught over and over again that book burning occurs in fascist countries like Nazi Germany, that book banning only occurs in totalitarian and authoritarian regimes that we oppose around the world.

I decided to take the board to court for violating my constitutional rights, as well as the constitutional rights and the First Amendment rights of teachers, educators, librarians, and all the other students.

-Steven Pico and four other students filed a lawsuit against the Island Trees School Board, and won.

The school board appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

-We will hear arguments next in Board of Education against Pico.

-What is the motivation behind the book banning?

That's what the whole case came down to.

-We argued that school officials could not remove books simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books.

If they remove the book solely because it contains a passage that offends a particular group in the community, then the First Amendment is concerned.

-The Island Trees Board of Education changed their argument.

They said, this really wasn't about political motive -- These books contain vulgarity.

One justice, Justice Stevens, reminded the school board attorney that one of these books contained no vulgarity at all.

-There is no vulgarity at all in that book?

-Their feeling is that it was -- -So the banning of that book cannot be justified on vulgarity grounds.

-That is correct.

They felt it was in bad taste.

-Now, what is the ground for banning it?

It's just bad taste?

Would it be permissible for them to take every book out of the library they thought was in bad taste?

What does bad taste mean?

-Four justices vote for us, four justices vote for the school board, and Justice White, the deciding judge, rejects the school board position and basically says the case should be sent back for a trial inquiring into the motive of the school board.

Rather than go to trial to explain how and why they banned books, the school board restored the books to the shelves.

Our system of free expression is dependent upon pluralism and a multiplicity of viewpoints.

-I think books are the foundation for our democracy.

I just think it's the cornerstone of everything -- ideas and thoughts and points of view.

I think, when we start putting limiters on voice and we put limiters on perspective and inclusion, I think that's a slippery slope.

♪♪ -The Pico legal team successfully resisted the ban, but the Court stressed that its ruling was confined to that particular case, so the Pico decision hasn't always provided specific guidance for future cases, but it at least stands for one key principle -- You can't remove books purely on political grounds.

In 2021, the Court reaffirmed the importance of a student's free speech rights, even regarding controversial ideas, by an 8-to-1 vote.

It said, "America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy.

Our representative democracy only works if we protect the marketplace of ideas."

Limits on this educational marketplace of ideas are not confined to primary schools and high schools.

Colleges and universities have been restricting free expression and exposure to opposing perspectives, even in the art department.

-If you're an artist exhibited in a big museum, you're going to be fine.

You can show whatever you wish.

But if you're kind of on the margins, that creates a problem.

-I think being an artist is a big, big, big responsibility itself.

We can be a part of a social change.

-Multimedia artist Serhat Tanyolacar fled censorship in Turkey.

He has taught at American colleges and universities since 2009.

-In academia, your duty is mostly to teach beyond teaching -- you know, mentorship.

One of my classes is art and politics.

Specifically, I have one month of censorship projects.

One way or another, you'll most likely offend someone else.

If you believe in something and that something really reflects something good, then fight for it.

-The first time we encountered his work was at the University of Iowa.

He had a KKK-like figure with a KKK outfit on a hanger, and the outfit was made out of newsprint.

-I made this KKK robe of printed newspaper articles all about past and current racist events.

It starts with the Tulsa Race Riot, and the last incident was a Holocaust museum shooting.

-Students started complaining that this was an offensive project.

And then, it was shut down.

-To do anything on campus... -Yeah.

-...you have to go to the Dean's Office.

You have to get approval from them first.

You wanted a reaction.

It got a reaction.

-The university initially said that he hadn't gotten permission, that's why it was shut down.

But, subsequently, they apologized for the project because it was offensive to certain groups.

You can discuss something nicely in the classroom, but when you have a work like Serhat's that brings the KKK on your college campus to show the violence, then they don't know how to deal with it.

-Before focusing on the final product, make mistakes and figure out -- you know, experiment.

-Universities are turning into brands.

If people are causing disruption and are making people angry, that's not good for the brand.

Everything does depend on brand -- which students decide to go to which school, which donors give to which university.

There's all these pressures on university administrators to think in that way, and very little incentive to think in a different way, which is, "We're not about one thing.

We're about lots of different things, and some of those things are going to be stuff that many of us feel very uncomfortable about."

We certainly can have a concept of decorum and a concept of norms, but I think it's really important to recognize that those sorts of concepts of decorum and norms have historically been used to shut up people who are rebellious.

-How much input should the public have on access to art?

Should governments influence artistic tastes?

In Germany, the 20th century saw strict censorship of the nation's artists, in a place where artistic exploration had recently flourished.

-Weimar Germany was the period between the end of the First World War and the rise and the takeover of the Nazi Party.

The liberal climate and the freedom of expression that is granted to artists leads to amazing, innovative experiments in the arts.

-It's about free thinking, and it is about a different way of thinking.

If you have a really narrow-minded concept of a society, you don't want to have that.

-In the 1930s, this climate of artistic innovation ended with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

-The direction that the arts took during the Third Reich was Hitler's own ideal of art.

Hitler himself was a failed artist.

He had applied to the art academy in Vienna twice.

He was rejected.

He practiced an art that was very traditional.

-Hitler's orientation towards art was, here is the norm, and this is our taste, and you have to follow that.

-In the summer of 1937, a commission was formed that had the task of cleansing German public collections of what was labeled "degenerate art."

-Art that was abstract, defied social norms, was critical of the government, or possessed a so-called "Jewishness" was labeled "degenerate art" by the Nazis.

-This commission removed roughly 16,000 works from German public museums.

Many of them were exhibited in one of the biggest propaganda exhibitions, the so-called "Degenerate Art Exhibition."

These works that were formerly kept in German museums were now ridiculed as bad works that could spoil the German people.

For many people, it was the first encounter with modern art ever, and many of them bought the propaganda.

-Much of the confiscated artwork was burned, lost, or sold abroad to support the Nazi war effort, which came to an end in 1945 with Germany's defeat in World War II.

-The German art scene in 1945 is laying there in ashes.

If we limit the freedom of artists, art easily collapses into what has been called kitsch, what has been called propaganda.

Freedom of expression is one of the ingredients that makes a good artist.

-When I was growing up, the big controversies were over Mapplethorpe's photography, and some of it was things like combinations of crucifixes and urine.

It does not make sense to me that we would seek to ban those things, but I do think that we could have a legitimate conversation about the use of public dollars and we can have a legitimate conversation about the ways in which people should be noticed.

-Deciding how to use public funds is central to the debates around restricting free expression on college campuses.

Recently, there have been many campus controversies about speech that members of the student body find offensive.

As a result, some universities have adopted a broad concept of emotional safety.

To protect students from certain ideas, offending voices have been suppressed.

But that's not how it began.

In the 1960s, the Campus Free Speech Movement was launched at the University of California, Berkeley.

The university administration had barred students from protesting the Vietnam War.

The reaction sent shock waves through higher education.

-There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious that you can't take part.

You can't even passively take part.

And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, and you've got to make it stop, and you've got to indicate to the people who run it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

[ Cheers and applause ] -Today at Berkeley, the words of free-speech leader Mario Savio are coming true.

Last night, a thousand students began a sit-in here in Sproul Hall.

At 3:00 a.m., police began hauling the limp trespassers off to jail.

These were the bodies in the wheels.

Now, 12 hours later, the big teaching machine has come to a halt.

-Where the protesters of the 1960s fought for less restriction of speech on campus, today, students often fight for more.

[ Whistle blows, metal clatters ] -Known as one of America's most liberal campuses, UC Berkeley... [ Explosion ] ...a war zone over conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos' appearance here.

-Whether there'll be a backlash, like the original free speech movement here in Berkeley in the 1960s, when it was a left-wing and radical cause, I don't know, it's certainly possible.

But there are also senior administrators whose main job these days is to ward off negative publicity.

And if that means sacrificing someone with a strong opinion, right now, there's no cost to suppressing speech.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Will you just listen for one minute?

[ Crowd shouting "No!"

] You sure?

[ Crowd shouting indistinctly ] I spent a lot of time preparing really hard questions.

We're going to have a great dialogue if you let us continue.

-I do think that objecting to speech is something that we have to allow people to do.

I do not want to see people do it to the extent that speakers cannot continue to speak themselves.

So there ought to be some way to tolerate both.

[ Protestors chanting "Shut it down!"

] -So, you need to feel emotionally safe sometimes before you start thinking.

But that doesn't mean that you should abolish thinking.

[ Protestors chanting indistinctly ] -I want to know what the other side is saying so that I can understand whether or not my position is correct, and if it is, the ways in which I need to sharpen it.

♪♪ I was at Wellesley College a few years ago, and I was there to give a talk, and a group of students got this false message about me.

The students refused to come to my talk, but then created a phalanx down the hallway that I had to exit through, so there was a huge gauntlet.

I did not leave.

I stood there and had a conversation with them for about 45 minutes.

And what was really super interesting was that there were a number who later contacted me who told me that they found it very life-changing to be part of a mob and to realize they had been misled.

They were in the wrong mob.

I am always sympathetic to the person yelling at me in the audience.

I am always sympathetic to the student protesting me, because I vividly recognize that as myself.

I could not have gotten where I am in my life were it not for protesters, were it not for women, mostly, who had objected to the way that they were being treated in the academy.

Today, we allow individual students to shut down entire classes, and that to me is the real problem.

-Digital culture has been an accelerant.

It has made it easy to do something people have always done.

In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville comes to America and says that the biggest threat to liberty in America, it's not the government, it's what we today call canceling.

He didn't have the term, but he gives a vivid description of all the ways in which people are socially essentially shut out.

They lose their livelihoods, their status, their friends, their professional associations if they get out of line with certain points of view.

-I was one of the first people canceled in 2001 after 9/11, and that was a canceling from the right, of course.

You know, I mean... [ Laughs ] It's funny.

Here we are, 20 years later, and I'm -- and everyone I know, by the way -- is more afraid of being canceled from the left.

Not that the right doesn't still have a bunch of snowflakes, too.

Nobody got canceled faster than Colin Kaepernick.

And that was a right-wing canceling.

But in general, when people think of canceling and when they fear it, they're talking about the left.

They're talking about people who are way too sensitive and just are humorless buzzkills.

Sadly, mostly the younger generation.

That's a complete reversal right there.

It used to be the young people who were free of mind.

Now they're the ones with the stick up... That, to me, is the saddest part of the whole thing.

You know, I mean, save some outrage for the golden years, because there's going to be some that you're going to need.

-Starting with the digital revolution and the rise of social media, it becomes almost trivially easy for me to get an online mob of tens or hundreds of thousands of people to say, you know, "Jonathan Rauch should be fired."

The ability to gather these crowds so quickly and target them so devastatingly, that is new.

-Controversy must be encouraged because it's the only way to advance knowledge, it's the only way to make moral progress, it secures the credibility of the academy and it prevents perverse backlashes.

I can't claim to really be a victim of cancel culture, because I'm in the privileged position of having tenure at a major university.

The problem is the intimidation that it imposes on people who aren't in my enviable position, that is, in people starting out their careers, in graduate students and post-docs, in assistant professors, in part-time lecturers, in journalists whose positions are far more precarious and who have been put on notice, if you say something that seems to go against the prevailing orthodoxy, your career could be over.

-And therefore, it's easy for people to say, "You know what?

It's better if I don't say anything.

It's not worth it."

But if everybody taking a particular position individually takes that point of view, then you completely distort public discourse.

-We need an all-of-society response in which every institution looks at itself and says, "How can I make myself more resilient, more of an ally of truth and of free speech?"

That's what works, if we can do it.

-Students gain especial benefit by engaging with ideas and speakers whose views are at odds with their own.

They may even be persuaded to revise or reject prior conclusions.

And even if discussions and debates don't change students' perspectives, they will likely enhance the students' understanding and articulation of their own views.

We all gain a more accurate impression of the world around us through exposure to multiple points of view -- the movies we watch, the books we read, the art we see, the music we hear, the lessons we're taught.

If we can absorb all of this freely and question and add to it freely, that allows each of us to grow and flourish as individuals.

And, just maybe, it will also benefit the whole of humanity.

I'm Nadine Strossen.

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