Jim Carroll says: A yrear ago thes organisations were moribund

I wish that were so, Jim. The alt-right movement has grown steadily through most of the last decade, with the growth of racial hatred against Obama and the provocative speech of FoxNews and the NRA (National Rifle Association). I guess one could blame Obama for giving new life to right-wing extremism.

And I suppose the change in court interpretation of the First Amendment had roots that were similarly contrarian, and may be due in large part to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU was founded in 1920 to protect the rights of people the government considered to be subversive. It was the ACLU that defended the rights of many on the Left who were affected during the McCarthy era. As time went on, the body of First Amendment court decisions led to the fairly rigid protection of free speech that we have in the U.S. now - and that absolute protection of free speech has become part of American thinking. It's something that Europeans often fail to understand, I think. I think it stems from an age where repression of speech was commonplace in the U.S., despite our First Amendments.

The Executive Director of the ACLU has an interesting article (click) about the organization's position regarding the recent occurrances in Charlottesville.

Note that while the ACLU promotes free speech, it deplores violence. When our free speech results in violence, we've lost. It's my impression that there is an underlying threat of violence in all that the alt-right says and does. I would like to think that is not the case with the Left, but I think we have to admit that sometimes we have failed, and some of those on our fringe have used demonstrations as an opportunity for violence. Nonviolence was a primary aspect of the campaigns of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and he worked hard to maintain the discipline of nonviolence. Even then, there often were accusations from the Right about violence on the part of civil rights demonstrators. After the death of King, the civil rights movement lost its discipline of nonviolence. It really bothered me that the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) turned so strongly toward a violent approach to supporting civil rights and opposing the Vietnam War.

And while I think our recent campaigns opposing Trump have been largely nonviolent, I think we have to admit that there have been a few incidents of violence on the part of people who are supposed to be on "our side" - and that has such a strongly negative effect on our credibility that I sometimes wonder if those incidents were actually caused by right-wingers wanting to make us look bad.

And it really bothers me to think that so many Americans believe Black Lives Matter to be a terrorist organization. I think it is of utmost importance to us to renew our committment to the discipline of nonviolence.

-Joe-