Long-ago celebrity actor Justine Bateman (she was the ditzy sister in the 1980s sitcom “Family Ties”) tilted against most of the rest of Hollywood by saying she was happy the once-and-future president won on November 5th. She said she could breathe again because of the “un-American” cancel culture that has stifled speech and thought for the last few years. She refused to say whether or not she voted for the first convicted felon to be elected to the presidency.
As a rule I’m spectacularly uninterested in what celebrities have to say about anything other than their chosen professions. But this one piqued my interest.
She’s right. Cancel culture was — and is — if not un-American (because its hard to find any sin or offense that the American government and/or citizenry haven’t gleefully committed and been celebrated for) a suffocating, oppressive, stinking insult to all of us.
Minnesota’s Sen. Al Franken, actor Gina Carano, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, sportscaster Sage Steele, and even Goya Foods have, to one extent or another, suffered for things they’ve said or believed in.
Think back to 1977 when the local branch of the National Socialist Party (AKA American Nazis) wanted to march in the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie. The ACLU went to bat for the Nazis in court, attempting to defend the nauseating bunch against legal attempts to stop them from demonstrating. The case even inspired a wacky scene in “The Blues Brothers,” with the Nazis being forced to leap off a bridge into the Skokie Lagoon, much to the delight of the theater-going audience.
The ACLU at the time said the right of free speech is paramount in the United States Constitution. The rights advocacy organization, staffed and financially supported by Jews far in excess of Jewish demographic representation in this country, held its nose and made a successful argument for the silly, stupid loons who dug Hitler.
As the ACLU lead attorney for the case explains it, notorious local Nazi Frank Collin called the Illinois ACLU office and complained that Skokie village officials were throwing scads of legal obstacles at his Third Reich-ian pals to get them to call off their march.
The lead attorney writes:
According to Collin, the demonstration was to consist of 25-50 party members demonstrating in front of the Skokie Village Hall. They were going to appear in Nazi uniforms with swastika armbands, carrying Nazi banners and signs with the words “Free Speech for White People.” Collin said they selected Skokie to protest decisions by Chicago-area park districts, including Skokie’s, barring them from holding a demonstration in Chicago area parks. The demonstration was to last for about 30 minutes, after which the Nazis would return to their headquarters on the south side of Chicago.
After much legal wrangling between Skokie and the Nazis, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Skokie’s prior restraint attempts were unconstitutional. The Nazis made a deal to move their demonstration to downtown Chicago where, on June 24, 1978, thousands of counterprotestors greeted them. The Chicago Police Department assigned one thousand cops to keep the counterprotestors from braining the Nazis.
By the way, the ACLU’s lead attorney in the case was a fellow named David Goldberger. He writes of Collin’s call to his office: “No mention was made of the fact that I was Jewish, though my last name made that fact unmistakable.”
I’ve been a staunch supporter of the ACLU ever since. There’s a beauty in its reasoning, that ugly, unpopular speech is precisely the thing the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they wrote:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That First Amendment stands as a model for the behavior of Americans. Every so often it’s even put into practice.
Here in Bloomington in 2017, a fellow named Charles Murray, a political scientist employed by the right wing American Enterprise Institute and who’d claimed that Blacks’ IQ scores were inferior to Whites’ due to genetic factors, was scheduled to give a speech at Franklin Hall. Dozens of student protestors gathered outside the hall and shouted en masse and through bullhorns while Murray spoke. This after 175 faculty, staff and student leaders signed an open letter to the IU president demanding the speech be cancelled. It wasn’t.
The crowd outside Franklin Hall dwarfed the audience inside listening to Murray’s nonsense. Murray high-tailed it out of Bloomington as soon as he finished his speech.
The university considered it more important to allow for a diversity of voices than to cater to the fragile sensitivities of protestors. That was then. Now? Well, just last year, IU canceled speeches and an art exhibit by pro-Palestinians. This year it closed down the campus’s traditional free speech zone at Dunn Meadow.
It’s always seemed to me that quieting people’s voices, no matter how awful their message, does more harm than good. I’d rather know what the racists, the Nazis, the misogynists, the supremacists, and all the rest are thinking and saying than to pretend they don’t exist. I want to know who they are so I can tell them to go to hell and, should they run for office, not to vote for them.
Too many of us on the Left have become rather like the cool kids in the high school cafeteria, sniffing dismissively and refusing to acknowledge the very existence of anyone not like us. When people from Texas complained undocumented immigrants were flooding border towns, we called them racists rather than saying How can we help?
When people responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by saying All Lives Matter, we called them racists rather than saying, Hey, I’m glad you agree with me!
People will be analyzing the 2024 election for decades to come. I hope they keep in mind the fact that we’re all still just like high school kids.
