Free to Speak

-Free speech is precarious.

It is easy for the government to suppress it, and there will be strong temptations for the government to suppress it.

-History shows that whenever authoritarians assume power, free speech is the very first ideal that they will try to curtail.

-Long live Big Brother.

-Long live... -The idea that, in order to protect your speech, you had to protect the speech of people who would do away with you, it's just like what?

-Free speech has got to be for everybody.

-Hate speech is bad, there's no question about it.

But the problem is not the speech, it's the hate.

-I think the question of what we should do and what we should be allowed to do are two very different questions.

-Unless you have the ability to voice ideas, you'll never hit all the correct ones.

-The most deadly natural disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere, somebody just called it, and they were run out of town.

-You don't need protections for speech that supports mainstream views.

We need protections for minority viewpoints.

-He is the newest face of defiance in Hong Kong.

-We value the idea that we are going to tolerate discomfort in the name of allowing people to have the potential for revolution.

-This was a cell like mine.

Who sleeps in democracy wakes up in dictatorship.

-Free speech is the ability to express ideas without fear of government intervention.

But does absolute free speech exist anywhere?

Should it?

As a lawyer, law professor, and past president of the ACLU, I've seen that free speech is the fundamental right that gives rise to all manner of social change and progress.

But should that freedom include hate speech?

We're living in a time when ideas and opinions, including bad ones, can be communicated by just about anyone to more people more quickly and more often than ever before.

In Germany, where the horrors of Nazism are far from forgotten, hate speech is strictly outlawed.

-Well, here in Germany, officials are warning of a rise in far-right extremism.

-Across Germany, there's been a 42% increase in violent crime by far-right extremists.

-A suspected far-right terrorist has shot dead 11 people near Frankfurt.

-A gunman targeting a synagogue on the holy day of Yom Kippur.

-A frightening echo of Germany's past.

-There is an actual threat where a lot of people are crying for somebody to go and do something is then leading to somebody going and doing something.

-Stephan Ernst was found guilty of shooting dead the politician in what's believed to be Germany's first far-right political assassination since World War II.

-His address was published on the Internet, and that is how his assassin found him.

-There is an absolute radicalization through online communities.

-In 2016, Anna-Lena von Hodenberg co-founded HateAid to push back against a rising tide of online hate.

-Free speech stops where your personality rights are violently invaded.

We think it's very, very important to enable people to get justice.

-Hate speech is prohibited under the German Criminal Code, Section 130 of the German Criminal Code.

Basically penalizes incitement of hatred -- racial hatred, national hatred, religious hatred, or ethnic minorities.

-German law criminalizes a range of speech on the rationale that it undermines human dignity.

-Laws on hate speech and humiliation and insult are not about protecting feelings.

It's upholding everybody's humanity, everybody's status as a person in society.

And in that sense, it goes back to Nazi Germany, where certain groups of people, particularly Jewish people, were denied to be human.

-We never want this to happen again.

Then you won't have any freedom of speech anymore.

-German statutes outlaw the public display of Nazi symbols and the support of Nazi ideology.

-Swastika?

Mnh-mnh.

Propaganda material?

Mnh-mnh.

No.

If you want to say the Holocaust never happened, sorry, it's not allowed to say it here.

-Certain organizations can't be formed, certain speech can't be heard.

But that is in the name of preserving democratic order.

Hate speech is a tool for exclusion, a tool for humiliation which excludes some members of society who are thereby silenced.

If activity is capable of inciting racial hatred, we are not going to wait until it actually happens or until it's likely to happen.

We are saying already at that point that it shall be prohibited.

[ Whistles blowing ] -United States law takes a different approach.

-The core principle of the First Amendment is that the government cannot restrict the expression of a point of view unless extraordinarily grave circumstances exist.

The fact that it would in fact create grave harm down the road -- not good enough.

-This principle is the result of a landmark 1969 Supreme Court case, which the court decided unanimously.

-Brandenburg against Ohio truly recognizes that free speech means not freedom of thought and speech for those with whom we agree, but freedom of expression for the expression we hate.

-Clarence Brandenburg was a vile Ku Klux Klan racist, as vile as they come.

-In June of 1964, Clarence Brandenburg held a small KKK rally outside Cincinnati.

He invited the local news to cover his speech.

-He wanted to eradicate Jews.

He wanted to eradicate Blacks.

He was saying the kind of stuff that Hitler would have been comfortable with saying.

But he was just saying it.

He didn't do anything.

-The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

The question is, what is the freedom of speech or the press?

What does it include?

Does it include hate speech?

Does it include advocating violence?

It doesn't mean everything.

And that opened up this enormous puzzle.

-Brandenburg was convicted of criminal syndicalism, or advocating violence.

The ACLU appealed the decision and assigned the case to attorney Allen Brown, who had made a name for himself fighting censorship.

-In the family, we all understood why my father took the case.

For him, the issue was the principle, not the client.

In fact, my father's office was interesting.

One day, I went in there, the Grand Wizard of the Ohio Ku Klux Klan, he's sitting in the front office right next to the head of the Cincinnati Black Panther Party.

Obviously, ideologically, they were poles apart, but legally, they had very similar issues.

-The Ohio Supreme Court rejected Brandenburg's appeal.

That set the stage for a constitutional battle at the US Supreme Court.

A 32-year-old African-American attorney, Eleanor Holmes Norton, signed on to the case.

-Yeah, it was I, a Black woman, who was arguing for the rights of White men who wanted to get rid of everybody's speech they could think of.

-Besides Eleanor Holmes Norton, the other lawyers that signed off besides my father were also Jewish.

So he had not a single White Anglo-Saxon Protestant representing him.

-I relished the opportunity to make the case for the First Amendment by arguing in behalf of people with whom I profoundly disagreed.

-We were not defending their speech.

We were resisting giving the government the power to decide that their speech could be banned, because once you gave the government the power to decide that their speech could be banned, you also gave the government the power to decide that your speech could be banned.

-During the oral argument before the Supreme Court, one exchange in particular highlighted this key concept.

-The prosecutor was a guy named Leonard Kirschner, also Jewish, and Kirschner was arguing to the court -- I think he was looking particularly at Thurgood Marshall -- and he said, "What Brandenburg did, it's as if he went into Harlem and started using the N-word."

-"Bury the Negro.

Send them back to Black Africa."

-You wouldn't last that long.

-Probably so, Your Honor.

-My father said, "Your Honor, you realize your remark just violated Ohio's Criminal Syndicalism Act?"

-Justice Marshall, who is safe at the moment because the venue is in Washington, DC, in Ohio, could be indicted for suggesting a violent reaction by the Negro community.

-It made it so clear what was at stake was not Brandenburg.

It was free speech.

-The court overturned the conviction of a Ku Klux Klansman and declared Ohio's criminal syndicalism law unconstitutional.

The ruling said a man cannot be punished merely for what he says if the words are not designed to incite lawlessness.

-In Brandenburg, the court held for the first time, unequivocally, that an individual cannot be punished for speech that offends or might cause others to respond with violence unless the speaker specifically intended to cause that and was likely imminently to cause a grave harm.

-It's not that you were afraid that it will lead to something.

It is leading to something.

It's imminent.

It's present.

-Whether you are racist or not, whether you agree with me or not, as long as it's only words, that's guaranteed by the First Amendment.

-Brandenburg drew that line more clearly and better than any Supreme Court decision ever had before.

-It is the eminent free speech case to this very day.

Its understanding of free speech remains law.

-Indeed the current legal standard for deciding when government may restrict inflammatory speech is called the Brandenburg Test.

-My views have, if anything, hardened since then.

As a member of the House of Representatives, I really have to be for free speech because I hear people on the other side saying things I'd like to clobber them about, but they are entitled to their free speech.

-What the genius of the First Amendment really has been is the understanding over time that either everybody has all these rights or nobody does.

-When we grew up, we rarely heard what we would today call hate speech.

Today, a kid growing up and goes on social media is going to hear it all the time.

-People are going to read it and read it again.

And then, things that we wouldn't allow to say would say, "No, this is unacceptable," are all of the sudden acceptable.

If you repeat it again and again, certain ideas, we are going to adopt it.

Not only children or young people, but also you and me.

This is something that we should not allow.

-Saying it's not good if people are mean to each other is different than saying people aren't allowed to say mean things to each other because then the question is, what does it mean to say something mean to each other?

That might not seem like such a controversial thing to begin with, right?

People shouldn't say mean things to each other.

Okay.

Who gets to decide?

What's the punishment?

And what does it mean to be mean?

-European societies, including Germany, think that there is a compromise to be struck.

That government can be entrusted to protect the rights of minorities through hate speech prohibitions whilst, at the same time, not abusing their power.

It's not Germany that is unusual in prohibiting free speech, but the US is unusual in allowing it.

-So, countries have different histories and there are values and lessons learned in different countries.

When the Supreme Court first began interpreting the First Amendment, it upheld the convictions of all sorts of people who did nothing more than hand out leaflets criticizing World War I on the ground that, "Well, that's not protected by the freedom of speech because that speech is unpatriotic and the government is entitled to prohibit that speech."

Nobody would say that today.

That would be insane.

You know, we were making it a crime to advocate communism 50 years ago, and we thought that was fine.

We did horrible things.

We've learned from our own mistakes that allowing censorship only allows more censorship.

-If you want to give the government the power to ban hateful speech, you have to be willing to give people in power the right to decide what's hateful.

And if you want to give that power, you have to imagine the people who don't like you exercising that power.

-So, if we empower the government to censor speech, even with the best intentions, will the government abuse that power?

Not necessarily.

But that has happened repeatedly throughout history.

Even words with positive or neutral meanings can become politically loaded and trigger restrictions.

Just think about words like "freedom" in repressive regimes or pronouns and other words that some view as microaggressions in this country.

Way back in the 1940s, a rather forward-thinking writer gave us a blueprint for dangerous speech controls.

-George Orwell defined and prophesied the nature of totalitarianism in a way that no other writer did.

Almost at the moment of his death in 1950, Orwell found his name turned into an adjective.

-Most Americans do not want to live in an Orwellian society.

-This is Orwellian.

-Orwellian.

-Orwellian.

-Orwellian.

-"Oh, it's Orwellian," people will say, without really knowing or thinking what Orwellian might actually mean.

-We are living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare.

-The activities of a surveillance state, the suppression of free speech, the manipulation of language to suppress individual human thought.

-Orwell is the first person to really figure out how totalitarianism works, how it can influence not just what we say, but what we think and what we believe.

-Orwell's nightmare vision of an all-powerful police state fills the pages of his seminal work, "1984."

-"1984" essentially is about an individual cog in the machine of this totalitarian monstrosity who decides to rebel.

-Down with Big Brother.

-Down with Big Brother.

-In addition to Big Brother, Orwell's novel introduced other terms still used to describe repression and propaganda, such as "Thought Police" and "Newspeak."

-He kind of gives us the template for understanding the core threats to free speech in the 20th century.

-"1984" looks terrifyingly prophetic.

You would have to say, I suppose, that North Korea is now the 1984 state.

-I was born in 1993, in the northern part of North Korea.

All I remember was really always struggling to find something to eat.

There is no running water, electricity we get like once or two times a year.

But I grew up thinking that I was living in the socialist paradise.

-When Yeonmi Park was 13, she escaped North Korea, traveling through China and Mongolia before arriving in South Korea, where she encountered ideas brand new to her.

-What is a democracy?

Like, what is human rights?

Those are like very base things that even children know in the West.

North Koreans, as although they've never heard such a thing.

-Language is the key to the suppression of free speech.

If you reduce the amount and the quality and the subtlety of language, ultimately it will be impossible to think, "What are unorthodox things?"

because you won't have the vocabulary to do it with.

-That's Orwell's "newspeak" -- eliminating certain words in order to eliminate the ideas they convey, which are considered subversive.

-The regime on purpose eliminated the word like "freedom," "human rights."

There's no word for "stress," because how can you be stressed in a socialist Paradise?

We don't even know what love is.

There is no word for love.

I never seen my father tells me he loved me or tells my mom he loved my mother.

People don't just not know the word, but we don't even understand the concept.

That's how they even control your minds and behavior, through controlling speech and words.

-If we can reduce the number of words available for minds to formulate things, it's much easier then to institute the orthodoxies that lie at the heart of our totalitarian program.

-I never knew even that I was oppressed or isolated from the rest of the world.

If you don't know you're a slave, how do you fight to be free?

It's impossibility.

That's how North Korea stays that way.

That's why there's no revolution, because nobody knows they're oppressed.

-When you have a repressive society, they always criminalize speech, probably because they are legitimately afraid of mass movements that could depose even the most totalitarian government.

And so they criminalize speech.

-Even when people do have the language to express themselves, free speech still can't exist unless people are willing to voice dissenting opinions.

And they won't do that when they fear retribution from the government, from employers, or even from friends.

No nation more thoroughly sowed mistrust and self-censorship than the former East German republic.

Just as in Orwell's "1984," people dared not speak for fear of who might be listening.

-In 1968, Hans Scheidler was imprisoned here at Hohenschonhausen.

Once a political prison in East Berlin, it's now a museum that documents one of the most repressive police forces in history.

-The Stasi was the secret police of the communist regime in East Germany.

Like the KGB in Russia.

The goal of the Stasi was to surveil people and to scare them.

It was the main instrument to neutralize freedom of speech, and they were very effective with that.

The minister of state security always said, "We have to know who is who."

He always sat at this table, by the way, when he sat here was his generals, he said, "The main question is who is who?"

That meant, "Who is thinking what?"

-Somebody can't really reach into your head and stop you from thinking what you're thinking.

But they can try.

They can certainly regulate you in such a way as to make you afraid.

-People are easily chilled from saying what they believe because of the risk of paying a price for that.

-The Stasi sparked fear and mistrust like no other regime before it, with its extreme surveillance traps and techniques.

It was the East German People's Big Brother, government's ever-present eyes and ears, straight out of Orwell's "1984."

-90,000 letters had been opened per day.

-This is a letter opener.

Basically it develops steam and you put letters on these things.

So the steam basically dissolves the glue of the letter.

-Of course, tapping phones.

-These are listening devices, bugs, basically, they often were purpose built by the Stasi.

Often they also used electronics from hearing aids.

That was already miniaturized.

-There was also video surveillance.

-Here we have a shoulder bag with a hidden camera in there.

-They collected the smell of people charged with some piece of clothes for better being able to track them with dogs.

-They kept everything.

The Stasi archive says what's there today is about 70 miles of shelf space.

-Eight years after World War II, they had more employees than the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, had.

And then, every decade, the number of employees doubled.

90,000 official employees and nearly 200,000 unofficial employees.

The informers, the spies who were really everywhere.

-Most of the information came from your neighbors, from your school, from your doctor.

Everywhere you worked, you went, any organization had information about you.

-It was very common to ask the kids at school how the watch in the TV news are looking like -- with spots or with little hash marks?

When the little children answered, "Yes, of course they have spots," then they knew it was the wrong channel, and that could be dangerous for the parents.

If one of the basic elements of human life, trusting other people, doesn't work, you always had to pay attention.

-There was a common sentence to say, if there are three people sitting together, one is an informer.

-These collaborators provided information that the Stasi used to subjugate and imprison their fellow citizens.

-In a free and open society, which is what we aspire to, people need to be courageous, they need to be willing to ask questions and seek to learn, seek to understand.

One cannot have a robust and effective democracy without freedom of speech.

-The ability and willingness to speak freely can lead to social change and new schools of political thought.

Of course, spreading ideas is easier now than ever.

Radio, television, the Internet all reach vast audiences.

And let's not forget books.

What happens when ideas in a book challenge or threaten a political regime?

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -This whole thing happened because of a book.

It all started because of a so-called banned book.

Of course, in the beginning, it was because I like reading.

I like reading, so I opened a bookstore.

At the start, it was similar to other bookstores.

-In 2003, Lam's bookstore in Hong Kong began catering to a new clientele, visitors from authoritarian mainland China.

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -There were a lot of books that couldn't be sold in mainland China, so a lot of people came from mainland China to find these books.

Hong Kong publishers also published a lot of books that mainland China was unwilling to publish.

It became a very big market.

-Inside all of us is an urge to speak, to use our senses, to use our reason.

We all have opinions that we typically would like to share.

-There is an innate sense in human beings that they want to have their voice heard.

I have two small children, and, so, I think a lot about sort of what are the things that they do, quote unquote, naturally.

-There is this notion that a child has of just speaking up against authority.

This is, I think, a wonderful thing about people is that they will keep rebelling to try to have that freedom.

It's a beautiful thing.

-In 2015, one of the bookstore's shareholders planned to publish a book critical of China's President, Xi Jinping.

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -When the authorities found out, they abducted all the people from the bookstore or took them away and they stopped the book from being published.

Five people from the bookstore were locked up by mainland China.

Two bookstore owners, two staff members, and me.

-When Lam tried to cross into mainland China to visit a friend, he was arrested.

-Very quickly, I was surrounded by 30-something people.

I couldn't move.

They took me to a police station in Shenzhen and held me there overnight.

The next morning, I boarded a train to Ningbo, and then I was locked up for five months.

-Authorities interrogated Lam and filmed his staged confession, which was broadcast on Chinese national television.

-Of course, they asked me to write it, so I couldn't say no.

They told me to show them after I wrote it because they had to amend it to say what they wanted to say.

After five months in Ningbo, I was transferred to Shaoguan, a rural town in the north of Guangdong Province, for three months.

And then, they made me go back to Hong Kong to get a laptop.

The laptop had some customer information they wanted me to bring back to mainland China.

They wanted me to go back to be locked up for another three months before releasing me.

But when they released me to go to Hong Kong to bring back the computer, I didn't do it.

-Instead, as a fugitive in Hong Kong, Lam went public with his story.

-Wearing spectacles and a hat, he is the newest face of defiance in Hong Kong against the central government in China.

-"If we remain silent," he said, "Hong Kong will become hopeless.

It's not only about me or the bookstore.

It's about the core values that Hong Kong people need to safeguard.

They shouldn't bow down before power.

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -I had no choice but to leave Hong Kong for Taiwan, I still had a requirement, a need for freedom.

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -Good evening, the Taiwanese people.

It's November 1st, 2022.

I'm here in Taipei.

-In Taipei, Lam Wing-Kee opened a recreation of his Hong Kong bookstore.

It's been embraced by Taiwanese citizens like Chen Tsai-Neng, who fear that the escalating Chinese repression in Hong Kong may soon visit their shores.

-[ Speaking Chinese ] -Because of how the Chinese Communist Party suppressed Hong Kong's revolution, the Taiwanese people woke up.

-China says it will fight to the very end to prevent Taiwan from being declared independent.

[ Applause ] -[ Speaking Chinese ] -Why is the freedom of speech important?

Because the freedom of speech is the foundation of a democratic nation.

Without it, it's not a democratic nation anymore.

-Can you criticize Xi Jinping at will like how they are doing it to President Tsai Ing-wen now?

-Actually, freedom of speech counts as a kind of freedom of thought.

Without freedom of thought, people cannot live.

-When a government interferes with its citizens' ability to speak freely, it's not just about political discourse.

Free expression can also serve as an early warning system for threats to public health and safety.

-I think the start of the epidemic would have been very different if it had been in an open society.

Because it was in a closed society with very strong restrictions on freedom of speech, and because the first two or three whistle-blowers in hospitals in Wuhan were persecuted, the virus got out of control.

-In December 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang noticed seven patients quarantined in his hospital in Wuhan, China.

They had a virus similar to SARS, the disease that triggered a global epidemic in 2003.

Dr. Li posted a warning to a group of medical school classmates on the social media site WeChat, saying, "Seven cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market."

He urged his colleagues to wear protective garb to prevent further infection.

But the virus wasn't SARS.

Unwittingly, Dr. Li had sent the world's first warning about a new and deadly coronavirus.

Days later, police summoned Dr. Li to the public security bureau.

They ordered him to sign a letter confessing that he had severely disturbed the social order by making false comments.

The police uploaded the letter to LI's account on Weibo, China's version of Twitter.

Police also questioned seven other members of the medical staff for spreading rumors, and officials in Wuhan asserted that the virus could only be spread through contact with infected animals.

The next month, Dr. Li was hospitalized with what the world would soon come to know as COVID-19.

-In a matter of days, Dr. Li Wenliang went from treating patients to becoming one.

[ Coughing ] -From his hospital bed, he told a Chinese journalist, "I think there should be more than one voice in a healthy society."

Dr. Li died a week later at age 34.

-In life, he sparked a national conversation about freedom of speech in China, and in death, he's become a national hero.

-By the time China officially agreed that there was human-to-human transmission happening, it was too late, the virus was already spreading, and therefore, the lack of free speech was a real problem with this pandemic.

-What disasters could be minimized by allowing early warnings to be heard?

-The most deadly natural disaster in the history of the Western Hemisphere had been predicted almost exactly as it played out.

It's a tragic story of a scientific prediction being made and ignored and actively silenced.

[ Voice breaking ] It's hard to imagine.

-The town of Yungay lies in the shadow of Peru's tallest mountain, the imposing Huascarn.

At over 22,000ft, it stands as the centerpiece of a remarkable story.

This is the town's cemetery, a reminder of Yungay's former glory.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -Well, it was like any other town.

It was a beautiful city, one of the most beautiful cities in the region of Ancash.

That was my beloved Yungay.

Eight streets, eight gardens, and 36 palm trees.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -The chapel was beautiful.

It had a beautiful shape.

There was a church that was built by the Spaniards, and there was a new church.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -All of that disappeared in just three minutes.

-You could say that the Andes are the geographical feature that has shaped Peru.

-It's also interesting to realize that this mountain range was caused by earthquakes.

If there were no earthquakes, we would have no Andes.

-There's histories of landslides, there's histories of avalanches, there's history of earthquakes.

Yeah, there's a lot of movement.

-In 1941, an avalanche into a glacial lake caused a massive flood.

Nearly 1,800 people lost their lives.

Then, in 1962, a six-million ton block of ice snapped off its perch on Mount Huascarn.

The landslide claimed over 4,000 lives and wiped the town of Ranrahirca off the map.

This was obviously a dangerous place to be, but as time went on, villagers learned to live with the danger.

-There had been much blaming of the government for not sharing enough information, for hiding information.

But what was different after 1962 was some pushback and some fights over who could produce knowledge about glaciers and lakes and who should shut up and stay out of it.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -Two American researchers came who arrived in September 1962 and were able to climb Huascarn.

-David Bernays is a well-known and accomplished mountaineer, and Charles Sawyer is a graduate student at MIT in the geosciences.

The Ranrahirca disaster was in January of 1962, so this is the same year.

This is nine months later.

And they come down and say, "We could have another one."

-They inform the authorities that the northern part of Huascarn exhibited major cracks, which were probably going to lead to bigger landslides than the one that happened in January 1962.

-I would like to check "Expreso" September 1962.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -This is the headline.

"Dramatic Revelation by Scientists."

"Horrific landslide threatens Yungay.

The roof of the world has turned into a mortal risk."

Well, this was an important finding that had consequences.

-Rather than acting in accordance with the finding, the Peruvian government acted to quash it.

-The political situation of the country in 1962 was unstable.

There had been elections, but they were annulled by a military coup.

Even if the Constitution guaranteed free speech, there could be media intervention or they could face threats.

-They are really trying to silence this information and stop it from spreading.

-The government pulled the "Expreso" newspaper off the stands and launched an offensive to suppress Bernays' and Sawyer's warning.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -Apparently, the authorities met with the researchers and told them to leave the country, which they did.

-The authorities in Yungay in particular say that if anyone is caught even talking in support of their conclusions, they could be arrested for disrupting public tranquility, was the statement.

I still remember this, my whole body being covered in goose bumps when I found these newspapers, just like, "Holy...this is real."

What happens in May 1970 is essentially exactly what they projected.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -I left Yungay on May 30th.

I left by bus, which, at the time, departed at 2:00 AM, and I clearly remember.

It's engraved in my memory, the image of... -[ Sobbing ] -...my mother, as she was waving good-bye.

And that was the last time I saw her.

-May 31st of 1970.

That's when the earthquake hit Ancash, leading to the landslide that buried the city of Yungay.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -Well, that day, it was a Sunday.

We were all happy, at ease.

We had lunch and then everyone went to have a shower or a bath so they could start the work week on Monday, the following day.

That's when the earthquake struck.

At first, it just felt like a gush of wind.

Then the earth started shaking.

And as the seconds passed, it got stronger and stronger.

At 3: 23 or 3:24 in the afternoon, it became a 7.8 earthquake on the Richter scale, and it lasted between 35 to 40 seconds.

The earthquake caused the northern peak of Huascarn to break.

-When Huascarn collapsed, it made such a loud noise, all the rocks came tumbling down.

I heard a boom just like a bomb.

I said, "We are not going to resist this one.

This one is too strong."

I was convinced we were going to die there.

I was watching and I said, "Yungay, it's over."

The landslide came and there were only four palm trees.

Nothing else.

-On that 1970 afternoon, the landslide destroyed 32 palm trees, leaving only four.

They are the mute witnesses of that afternoon.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -So, on May 31, we learned about the tragedy.

We learned confidentially that Yungay was completely gone and that the chances of finding survivors in the center of town were very slim.

My mother, my father, my siblings disappeared.

I've never been able to find them.

I don't know where they died.

-More than 15 million of debris obliterated Yungay.

Tens of thousands of people were killed.

-I think the scale of that, you know, the scale of the 1970 disaster and so many people dying, it's just hard to... hard to believe that somebody just called it.

-[ Speaking Spanish ] -I think that, if we had taken their warnings seriously... ...we could have reduced the risk for this population.

-Maybe if they had told us, "You need to leave Yungay and go somewhere else," perhaps we would have listened and the tragedy would have been spared.

Less people would have died.

But let's be honest.

Men and women are stubborn creatures, and you don't want to leave the land where you were born and where you grew up.

-[ Laughs, speaks Spanish ] And us, men and women from the Andes, well, we are stubborn.

-You can't erase risk, and we're not always perfectly logical in how we rank risks in our own lives.

But I also think there's no way to manage what all those risks are if you don't even know what some of them are.

A lot of the arguments against Bernays and Sawyer and against having their news and their predictions discussed was that it was going to impact economics in a bad way.

Right?

It would threaten tourism.

And in a way, that's the same arguments we're continuing to see -- this choice of do we want economic prosperity, or do we want to do something here to protect people?

When you have other people making those decisions for you by censoring information based on these super black and white either or, I think that's problematic.

There's no way to save everybody 100%.

There's no way to make everybody happy.

But if you don't even share the information, if you suppress it, then there's no way that anybody is reacting.

-Governments around the globe have long refused to discuss controversial subjects, even issues of great importance to their people.

Here in the United States, in 1836, a Southern member of Congress proposed banning congressional discussion of the most controversial issue of the day -- slavery.

The resolution passed, 117 to 68, freedom of speech repressed in the very heart of our republic.

When John Quincy Adams jumped up to protest, the speaker ignored him, and Southern congressmen shouted him down.

Adams yelled, "Am I gagged?"

And he denounced the new gag rule as a violation of the Constitution.

When the government refuses to consider an issue, our best recourse is to take it to the free press.

-It was on this corner.

It was approximately here, where that sign is.

That's where the actual People's Grocery sat, where Moss, Stewart, and McDowell had their store.

This is a Black-owned business that's right on this corner.

Right across the street over here on this vacant lot was a White-owned grocery store, and the owner's name was William Barrett.

-This was in a predominantly Black neighborhood in this area called the Curve.

People who lived there started, you know, patronizing the Black-owned store, so the White man who owned the store decided that he was going to eliminate the competition.

[ Shouting, glass shattering ] -A fight broke out.

The police get called into it, and they wind up arresting the People's Grocery owners.

A mob forms.

Moss, McDowell, and Stewart are captured.

They are brought out here by these railroad tracks on the outskirts of the city, and they're murdered here.

-Just before being shot by the lynch mob, Thomas Moss's last words were, "There is no justice here."

One of his best friends, a 29-year-old journalist, Ida B.

Wells, was listening.

-My great grandmother, Ida B.

Wells, was a journalist, a suffragist, a civil rights activist who used truth to bring light to lynching and make people aware.

-Ida B.

Wells was born into slavery in 1862, a year into the American Civil War.

Today, the house that belonged to her slaveholder is a museum that honors her legacy.

-She came of age during what was called Reconstruction.

That was from 1865 to 1877.

It was a time in our country's history that was full of newfound rights for formerly enslaved people.

She was the first generation to have the opportunity to become formally educated.

But then there was this huge backlash where rights that she grew up enjoying started to be taken away, and she wasn't willing to go backwards.

Tennessee passed a law that segregated public transportation.

My great-grandmother was living in Memphis, Tennessee, at that time, and she had been riding the train in an integrated car for a couple of years at that point.

On September 15th, 1883, the train conductor asked her to leave the ladies' car and go to the colored car, which doubled as a smoking car, and she refused.

-Ida B.

Wells was dragged from the train by a group of men.

She sued the railroad company and lost.

-In her writings, it's clear that she lost faith in the legal system.

She turned ultimately to journalism as a way to create basically the court of public opinion.

-If you don't have the right to make people aware of what's going on and to organize opposition to it, then you can never address that underlying issue.

John Lewis, the great voting rights activist, once said that without free speech in the First Amendment, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.

-Free speech has always been the most powerful weapon in the hands of the marginalized, the powerless, because they may not have money, they may not have guns and tanks, but they can spread ideas.

-This is the former site of a newspaper that Ida B.

Wells co-owned and edited.

Notably, the paper was named the Free Speech and Headlight.

-Ida B.

Wells was determined to help Americans understand the pain she was seeing around her.

She was focused on exposing one thing in particular, which was lynching.

-Lynching is the taking of a life extrajudicially by three or more persons.

-Black people could be dragged out of their homes at any moment's notice for any reason whenever anybody felt like it.

There was no protection, because the people who were doing it were the sheriff, they were the attorneys, they were the judges.

They were the law.

-The People's Grocery lynching in Memphis struck especially close to home.

-My great grandmother, these were her friends.

-Ida B.

Wells was the godmother of Thomas Moss's children.

They were very, very close friends.

I mean, and when that happened, all the work she had been doing about lynching is now visited in a very personal way.

-We have to find out how many other innocent people are being lynched.

People need to know that this is happening.

-Throughout the 1890s, Ida B Wells traveled across the South to gather eyewitness accounts and document lynchings for newspaper articles and her pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases.

-She was going out, basically, in the field and interviewing people with facts, figures, dates, locations, names, what today is called data journalism.

She was building an airtight case that this is domestic terrorism.

This is not about punishment for a crime.

The narrative when it came to justifying Black men being killed a lot of times was that they had violated White women.

-If a Black man was observed even looking at, you know, at a White woman, he could be lynched.

-She finally wrote an article about how some of the liaisons that had taken place between Black men and White women were consensual, and that was an extremely volatile thing to say out loud.

Lucky for her, she was out of town when it was published.

-Enraged by her article, a mob ransacked the Memphis offices of her newspaper, The Free Speech, and her printing press was destroyed.

Ida B.

Wells never returned to Memphis.

She moved to Chicago, worked with Frederick Douglass, and in 1895, met and married attorney and Civil Rights activist Ferdinand L. Barnett.

They raised their family in this home.

-Knowing that someone like her existed and created a space for someone like me to pursue a career in journalism obviously motivates me, and I really do feel fortunate that I can say that I play a small part in carrying on her legacy.

I mean, that makes me incredibly proud.

-Ida B.

Wells' journalism shows some of the noblest part of free speech in that it helps shine a light on deep injustices, a lone voice fighting against overwhelming odds using only her pen and her courage as her weapons.

-The abolitionist movement, the movement for women's equality, the gay rights movement, the movement for marriage equality, all of these have depended on the expression of ideas that were unpopular to the point of being illegal in their own time.

-It is how we got women's rights and gay rights and civil rights and nothing, nothing out there breaks my heart more than seeing activists who represent or claim to represent oppressed minorities turn against free speech, our best and truest friend.

-Here in the U.S., the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed what it calls the First Amendment's bedrock principle, that government may not bar the expression of an idea just because society views the idea as offensive or dangerous.

Yet even here, as in other democracies, controversial speech will always be under attack.

So how do we protect it?

Freedom of speech requires more than words in a constitution or court decisions.

It also depends on a supportive civic culture where all members of our society actually understand and exercise their free speech rights, dialogue, debate and tolerate the same rights for others.

In other words, freedom of speech is not just a legal principle.

It is real people actually speaking freely.

I'm Nadine Strossen.

-Funding provided by the John Templeton Foundation, DKT Liberty Project, Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.