NEW POD: FREE SPEECH AND DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE.

RETURN TO SKOKIE

Sorry this is late — I’ve been buckled down on some intense reporting for the documentary for the past 48 hours.

Find this week’s show here. Just click.

The principle of free speech is a very emotional one for me as it should be for all journalists. It is the bedrock, the foundation we fight for when we put ourselves in wartime harm’s way or receive secret documents or fight a vexatious libel suit. Yes, lawfare is deployed against journalists, too. The tightening of the censorship screws around the world is at a tipping point. More reporters are being harassed and arrested with few in the still powerful legacy media coming to their defence. Governments are imposing absurdly totalitarian bills that give them the power to arrest people who say or write things that challenge power, including Canada’s BillC-63.

Inch by inch we have ceded the territory by tolerating university brats who can’t bear hearing mean words and have violently prevented speech they don’t like. Then there are the billionaire bullies like Bill Ackman who instigated serious and long term consequences for students who dared criticize Israel for it’s attacks on Gaza — deemed a genocide by many sober scholars. In both cases there was some awful and hurtful speech — but the answer isn’t to shut it down, kick students out of school or circulate blacklists like Ackman did. Sometimes we must live with painful things for a higher principal which is what Skokie was all about. I fear we have forgotten how to do that.

My guest this week is executive vice president of FIRE — who has produced a wonderful documentary worth watching about the importance of defending a Nazi group’s right to march through a mostly Jewish neighbourhood full of Holocaust survivors. Nico Perrino also does a free speech podcast worth your time

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I’ll leave you with a few graphs from a piece written by David Goldberger the ACLU lawyer who argued the case. There was a lot of pushback but also support.

I remember other instances of unexpected support, too. There were times when, during speeches I gave about the Skokie case, Holocaust survivors courageously stood up to say that I was right to have represented the Nazis. Several years later, another survivor sent me a letter saying the same thing. These survivors said that they did not want the Nazis driven underground by speech-repressive laws or court injunctions. They explained that they wanted to be able to see their enemies in plain sight so they would know who they were.

Their statements were like lights in the darkness of anger and misunderstanding. To this day, I have no doubt that the ACLU’s commitment to equal rights for all is a backbone of our democracy — no matter how offensive our clients are. Chipping away at this commitment will open the door to the erosion of the First Amendment as a bulwark against rule by tyrants.

Nico’s documentary is called Mighty Ira about Ira Glasser of the ACLU and the Skokie fight.

Nico’s podcast is So To Speak and can be found here.

#truthovertribe

Stay critical.