In the late 1970s, Skokie, Illinois, was home to tens of thousands of Jews, many of whom were Holocaust survivors. That’s when the National Social Party of America, which self-identified as Nazis, planned a march against them.
Shockingly, the American Civil Liberties Union came to the defense of these Nazis and their First Amendment rights.
“Even card-carrying ACLU members resigned in droves, saying, ‘We support free speech, but this goes too far,’” Nadine Strossen, former president of the ACLU tells James Poulos of “Zero Hour,” adding, “The ACLU lost 15% of our members.”
“Even though that case was a loser in the court of public opinion, including among ACLU members, it was an easy winner in the courts of law because of that bedrock viewpoint neutrality principle: Government may never punish speech solely because its viewpoint is loathsome and loath,” Strossen continues.
The ACLU even defended the 2017 Unite the Right demonstrations in Charlottesville, because there was no evidence that any violence was planned. However, while the ACLU has historically come to the defense of free speech, there have been some changes recently.
“I’m going to acknowledge again the kind of shift that I acknowledged earlier, and it’s a generational shift,” Strossen says. “Younger cohorts within all of these institutions that had traditionally supported free speech, academia, journalism, publishing, ACLU librarianship, etcetera, every indication, including surveys, show that the younger you get, the less supportive people are of classical free-speech values.”
“You see that even in the legal profession, so at some point, that dwindling support for classical liberal free speech values may affect the judiciary as well,” she adds.
Poulos believes that what’s been laid at the feet of younger generations must be seriously protected.
“I think it’s increasingly clear that these things do need to be defended, we do need a broad coalition to defend them, and if we don’t, it’s just not going to be America anymore,” he says.
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