 In 1977, the American Civil Liberties Union went to court to defend the rights of American Nazis. The village of Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, tried to prevent the National Socialist Party of America from holding a demonstration in its streets. Ira Glasser was then the head of the New York Civil Liberties Union. They should have ignored these people. When the count of Skokie responded and said, you better not come here, we won't let you, they had an opportunity for publicity of the kind that they could never get. The ACLU defended the Nazis' right to march, winning the case on First Amendment grounds, but at a high cost, 30,000 members left the organization in protest. But Skokie, more than any other case, cemented the ACLU's reputation as an unwavering and principled defender of the First Amendment, willing to stand up for the rights of even the most odious members of society to freely speak their minds. We weren't representing the Nazis. We were trying to oppose the government. Glasser understood that if the government were permitted to silence a Nazi, it could use that same power against anyone deemed a radical or a threat to the status quo. I used to say to black students in the 90s who wanted to have hate speech codes on college campuses that barred hateful speech, that had they been in effect on college campuses in the 60s, Malcolm X would have been their most frequent victim, and maybe Eldridge Cleaver, but not David Duke. The year after Skokie, Glasser would become the organization's executive director, a position he would hold for the next 23 years. Now he's the subject of a new documentary, Mighty Ira, that celebrates his time at the ACLU. In real terms, it highlighted the issue of why would you ever want to fill the rights of people like that? It basically forced me to articulate reasons for the First Amendment position that the ACLU took in the most hostile and uncomfortable circumstances. But Glasser, who retired in 2001, now fears that the organization that grew into a nationwide civil liberties powerhouse on his watch has backed away from the principled stance exemplified by Skokie. In 2017, the ACLU was criticized for defending the organizers of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few minutes after that, students associated with Black Lives Matter at William & Mary shouted down an ACLU speaker. The following year, a leaked memo offered guidelines for future case selection in which the ACLU seemed to retreat from its long-standing content neutral stance, citing as a factor to consider when deciding to take a case the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values. That memo did, in fact, unarguably introduce a content-based consideration to whether or not they would take a free speech case. Enough so, it made me wonder if Skokie's case happened again, would the ACLU take it? And I don't know. Glasser says there's never a conflict between pursuing social justice and defending free speech, quite the opposite. My major passion was social justice, too, particularly racial justice. But my experience was free speech wasn't an antagonist. It was an ally. It was a critical ally. There is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement to justice, to help its movement survive. John Lewis, who said that without free speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings. And that's historically and politically true without exception. So for people who today claim to be passionate about social justice, for them to establish free speech as an enemy is suicide. I mean, where would the Black Lives Matter movement be without the right to free speech? The only important question about a speech restriction is not who is being restricted, but who gets to decide who is being restricted. If it's going to be decided by Joe McCarthy, if it's going to be decided by Richard Nixon, if it's going to be decided by Rudy Giuliani, if it's going to be decided by Trump or William Barr, then most of the social justice advocates are going to be on the short end of that decision. It's not politically outrageous during times like this for the ACLU to want to become more of a political organization than a civil liberties organization. The problem with it for civil liberties is that there's a lot of progressive political groups out there. And I'm glad to have more of them because that's my politics too. But there's only one ACLU. And if the ACLU takes itself off the stage of defending speech on a content neutral basis because it's too dangerous to allow the government the power to decide. So it doesn't matter in whose behalf the immediate client is. What matters is you have to stop the government from gaining the power to decide. If the ACLU steps off that stage, even slightly, who's going to replace it?