Jake Sullivan: America's capacity for self-correction and reinvention set us apart

From the Union Leader

November 20, 2025

Editor’s Note: Former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was guest speaker at the 2025 First Amendment Honors program of the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications on Oct. 23. These are excerpts from his remarks, edited for length. The full program and his talk are available at Loebschool.org. Sullivan and his wife, U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander, reside in Concord.

TONIGHT, you’ve honored Sean Young for a courageous act of personal expression, and you’ve honored Melanie Plenda for her tireless work building the very ecosystem where expression can flourish and inform the public debate.

Let’s start back in Conway at Leavitt’s Country Bakery … when art students from Kennett High School, painted this mural on his building’s facade. This was a whimsical, joyful piece of public art, a mountain range made of donuts, muffins and cinnamon rolls set against a vibrant sunrise. The community loved it, but as we heard in the video, the town, they cited the bakery, claiming the mural was not art, but rather an illegal sign, because it depicted baked goods, the very thing that Sean sells. Had his students just painted mountains, it would have been fine, but because they painted donut mountains, it was a violation.

Sean Young said that makes no sense. He took his case to federal court (and) in May of this year Judge (Joseph) LaPlante affirmed a simple but powerful idea in America: the government doesn’t just get to be an art critic. It can’t silence speech simply because of an arbitrary decision that it thinks it conveys one thing rather than another.

Some may see this as a local issue, a modest issue, but as all those comments on that Facebook page, all those people who viewed that, they saw this as way more. They saw it as something profound, because it is a society where a baker, a local proprietor, can challenge his government over the right to speak and win. It is a society that is unafraid of dissent. It is a society that trusts its citizens and trusts its institutions to resolve disputes, not by dictate, but by law, and that is a society that can correct its own mistakes.

This capacity for self-correction is at the core of America’s resilience. In my role as National Security Advisor, I studied the strengths and weaknesses of nations, and I can tell you that in the rigid, top-down systems of our adversaries, this story is not possible. The state is absolute. A challenge like Sean’s wouldn’t end in a courtroom victory. It would end in silence or worse, that fear-based conformity can create a brittle society, one that can’t innovate and adapt or absorb shocks.

The American system, by contrast, is designed for resilience. It anticipates error, and we make plenty of errors, and it builds in the mechanisms for its correction. Here, there was an error. It was an error made by the town, and the error was corrected. Yes, it was corrected by a judge, but more importantly, it was corrected by the Constitution of the United States, by the First Amendment that we’re celebrating here today. And this democratic resilience, this ability to transparently course correct, I think, is a national security asset we need to protect and we need to cherish this.

As the director of the Granite State News collaborative (Melanie Plenda) is on the front lines of a critical part of the fight, a fight to preserve what I call the infrastructure of truth through initiatives like the Know Your News campaign. She’s working to strengthen local journalism, to equip citizens with media literacy skills — the things they need to be able to navigate what has become an insane and complex information landscape.

And this, too, is a matter of national security. One of the most insidious threats we face today is information warfare. Adversaries, both state and non-state actors, are using a playbook of malign influence tactics. Their goal is to exacerbate existing social divides, amplify polarization, and erode the very trust that holds our democracy together.

The single most effective defense against this assault is a robust, trusted, independent, local press; a community that trusts its local reporters to cover the school board meeting, to cover the issues that matter in your daily lives, to be able to discern truth from fiction or falsehood, is a community that is less likely to fall for a foreign troll farms propaganda. A free press, at the end of the day, is our shield.

Our openness is our greatest strength and it is that a free press is not the enemy of the people, but the people’s greatest ally in holding power to account … and as the recent editorial in the Union Leader pointed out, our openness, our right to freedom of speech and to our other First Amendment rights can come under pressure in surprising and aggressive ways, and it’s important for all of us to push back, because that’s the kind of self correction that is the very engine of our resilience. It is our shield against foreign attacks through information. It is our source of creativity, of innovation, and yes, at that unique capacity that America has for reinvention.