An advocacy group that has spent more than two decades fighting for free expression on college campuses is broadening its efforts to fight so-called cancel culture and other perceived threats to free speech across American society.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere. Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union's primacy as a defender of free speech.
“To say the least, we have not solved the campus free-speech problem, but we started to realize if we wanted to save free speech on campus we have to start earlier and we have to do things not on campus,” the group’s president, Greg Lukianoff, said.
Lukianoff said FIRE has raised $28.5 million for a planned three-year, $75 million litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.
“There’s a very strong belief in not just the First Amendment, but a culture of freedom of speech that — black or white, liberal or conservative — that most Americans think you should be entitled to your own opinion and not have to lose your job over that,” Lukianoff said. “The voices that think of free speech as a dirty word on campus or on Twitter are actually a pretty small minority.”
The new initiative includes $10 million in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech, officials said.
One TV spot includes a former Emerson College student, K.J. Lynum, whose conservative group was suspended by the school’s president for circulating “China kinda sus” stickers promoting the theory that a Chinese government lab caused the oubreak of Covid-19. “Freedom of speech is our right as Americans and we must do everything we can to protect it,” Lynum says over images of Martin Luther King Jr. and a young anti-abortion activist.
Another ad features a Montana State University student, Stefan Klaer, who was ordered to take down a Black Lives Matter banner from his dorm room window. “If you silence people, you never get to hear the other side,” Klaer says.
FIRE’s move seems likely to face an uphill battle with many on the political left disillusioned about unfettered free speech following former President Donald Trump’s successes at perpetuating misinformation. The megaphone social media platforms have given to voices spouting untruths has also prompted some former free-speech devotees to reconsider their views.
“Thinking that free speech is the problem here is, I think, missing the point,” Lukianoff said. “Do I believe bad actors are abusing this? I do. ... It’s always been the case that some people have believed absolutely crazy things. ... I'm more afraid of top-down attempts to control Twitter than I am of the cultural harm it produces."
FIRE’s new expansion is also a challenge of sorts to the ACLU, which has faced criticism in recent years for drifting from its unapologetically pro-free-speech roots and taking a more direct role in partisan political fights.
Many of FIRE’s founders and backers are former leaders of the ACLU who have grown disillusioned with the group under its current executive director, Anthony Romero, who left the Ford Foundation to take over the storied civil liberties organization in 2001.
In 2020, FIRE released “Mighty Ira,” a laudatory documentary film about Romero’s predecessor, Ira Glasser, focusing on the ACLU’s work from the 1970s through the 1990s.
Glasser, who serves on a FIRE advisory board, said in an interview that he “strongly encouraged” FIRE to broaden its free-speech work in part because the ACLU seems to be abdicating that role.
“Once the ACLU backs off its traditional role, who else is there?” Glasser asked. “It’s great to have the ACLU fighting for racial and reproductive justice and gay rights. …The notion that you have to reduce your vigor with which you defend First Amendment rights or you will damage the strength of your advocacy for equal rights for women, gays, and Blacks, et cetera is just demonstrably not true and, yet, they’ve done that. It has created a vacuum in the viewpoint-neutral defense of free speech, which FIRE has filled.”
ACLU officials did not respond to messages Sunday seeking comment for this story.
The ACLU faced internal upheaval in 2017 after its Virginia chapter provided legal assistance to white-nationalist groups seeking a permit to demonstrate in Charlottesville, Va. The “Unite the Right” rally they held ended with violence, including the death of a 32-year-old woman who was run over by a car driven by a far-right demonstrator whose friends said he was obsessed with Hitler.
The ACLU later recalibrated its free-speech advocacy, urging that its lawyers considering what cases to take also consider “offense to marginalized groups.” Romero also said it would not defend those seeking to engage in protests while armed.
Among those endorsing FIRE’s expansion are former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
“I think for FIRE to spread its wings is very constructive,” said Summers, who served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006 and was National Economic Adviser for from 2009 to 2011 under President Barack Obama.
Summers told POLITICO he’s troubled that “a stifling conformity” in discussions about issues related to identity on college campuses seems to be spreading.
“We’re seeing some tendency to some of the same imposition of orthodoxy beyond college campuses and some elevation of comfort-seeking relative to truth-seeking much more broadly,” Summers said.
Even with the planned expansion by FIRE, the ACLU will continue to dwarf the upstart organization in size and funding. The ACLU enjoyed a massive surge in funding following Trump’s victory in 2016 and now brings in almost $400 million to its coffers each year. FIRE, by contrast, raised under $16 million in its last fiscal year.
And while the ACLU and its affiliates are involved in hundreds of court cases each year in 19 policy areas ranging from voting rights to privacy to immigration, FIRE had only six cases in active litigation in the last fiscal year, according to its annual Internal Revenue Service filing.
FIRE contends that since it debuted in 1999 it has won over 500 public victories for students and faculty members, secured 425 campus policy changes, and helped drive down the prevalence of highly-restrictive campus speech codes.
While FIRE has received praise from many free-speech advocates, some critics have said the group is a thinly veiled front for conservatives looking to promote their political agenda. Since its inception, FIRE has received funding from a variety of conservative foundations, including millions from some linked to billionaire Charles Koch.
Lukianoff declined to detail who has contributed the $28 million for the new initiative or what prompted them to offer funding.
However, he said in the last fiscal year, about 69 percent of FIRE’s funding came from individual donors and about 31 percent from foundations.
Lukianoff acknowledged disappointment with major liberal foundations, who have balked at supporting FIRE’s efforts. “It’s been frustrating,” he said, adding, “Most of FIRE's staff leans to the left politically.”
Lukianoff said his group also regularly defends left-leaning students and faculty members when their freedom of expression is threatened.
“We're genuinely nonpartisan in the cases we take,” he said.
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By: Josh Gerstein
Title: Free-speech group will spend millions to promote First Amendment cases
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/06/06/free-speech-group-first-amendment-00037320
Published Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2022 04:01:00 EST
