Hacker Cinema
Mighty Ira
2020 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Nico Perrino, Aaron Reese, Chris Maltby
Ira is one of America's unsung champions of civil rights and liberties. As his generation retires from the barricades, Ira reminisces on his life at the forefront of defending the rights of all Americans.
5 positivefrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
> As some one who lives under a blasphemy culture, I think American greatly take for granted their freedoms of speech, and it boggles me that this is not a corner stone of the American Left.
It absolutely was a cornerstone value for American liberals in the past.
A documentary about the director of the ACLU, back before the ACLU abandoned it's principles, looks at how far the organization went to protect the speech of literal Nazis. The ACLU winning a Supreme Court case for their right to hold a public protest march was widely celebrated by those on the left.
>[The First] Amendment assures that even the most odious among us (with “odious” being the term that we apply to those we loathe, but who might view us as odious) the right to express themselves either orally, in writing, or by demonstrating or marching.
It was the freedom to march that caused a major flare-up back in the late 1970s, when members of the American Nazi Party, in uniform and bedecked with their decorative swastikas and stormtrooper boots, applied for a permit to march through the town of Skokie, Illinois...
To Glasser and the ACLU leadership, including David Goldberger, who headed the local Illinois chapter, freedom of speech is meaningless if it is not accorded across-the-board to all those along the ideological spectrum.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020/10/22/mighty-ira-a-documentary-about-the-man-who-defined-american-civil-liberties
See also the 2020 documentary Mighty Ira: https://www.mightyira.com/
Since several people are asking why the ACLU isn't what it once was, let me answer that.
In 1978, the ACLU successfully defended the right of neo-Nazis to march in the predominantly Jewish town of Skokie, Illinois. This action reflected their commitment to free speech, regardless of how offensive the speech might be. The movie "Skokie" and documentary "Mighty Ira" are based on this event-- I highly recommend them because this is an important piece of U.S. history.
In contrast, the modern ACLU has backed away from this stance. A leaked ACLU memo[1] says that before they take a free speech case, they will consider the "context of the proposed speech; the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur."
[1] https://reason.com/2018/06/21/aclu-leaked-memo-free-speech/
But should it really be big tech's responsibility to triage? If so, based on what information? The CDC? WHO? Then what happens if a doctor on the frontline wants to disagree with one particular aspect of the "authoritative source" information, posts their discoveries on Facebook/Youtube, and is censored because it was classified as misinformation? That would effectively mean the government is suppressing speech.
Sounds fine and dandy as long as you, the consumer of information, is aligned with the authoritative sources, but history has shown time in and time out that regimes change and that power is intoxicating and that those that want suppressed speech can eventually become the suppressed.
Nobody says this better IMO than Ira Glasser who led the ACLU from '78-2001 and defended the rights of Nazi's to march. Check out the documentary Mighty Ira.
The head of the ACLU from the 1970s to 2001 says he doesn't think the ACLU of today would have taken the cases that made them famous. (See "Mighty Ira" a documentary on him.)
The ACLU caving to political donors under new executive directors in the Obama years isn't a nothingburger to lawyers like me who looked up to them.