Leftists often hate the very people who defend their freedoms. They hate their benefactors even more than they hate other people who didn’t help them!
On the progressive website Bluesky, one of the most hated organizations is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE defends the free speech rights of people regardless of their ideology. “In 2024, 60 percent of FIRE’s casework involved people threatened by censorship attempts that came from their political right,” explains Wikipedia. FIRE represents left-wing faculty who are censored, such as Lora Burnett, who was punished for saying Vice President Mike Pence should shut “his little demon mouth.” FIRE brought a successful lawsuit challenging Florida’s STOP WOKE Act on behalf of left-wing academics. But FIRE also represents conservatives who are censored, successfully suing on behalf of conservative students after the left-wing president of California’s Clovis Community College “ordered their anticommunism fliers be taken down from bulletin boards after administrators received complaints.”
Because FIRE represents conservatives as well, leftists hate FIRE. Oddly, they hate FIRE more — not less — than they hate the staunchly conservative Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). ADF has successfully challenged many campus speech codes, but unlike FIRE, it doesn’t represent left-wing students and faculty. The ADF usually only represents people who are conservative, religious, or non-woke. Left wingers falsely brand the ADF as a “hate group” — even though it has won multiple Supreme Court cases protecting constitutional rights, some times by wide margins such as 8-to-1. But leftists actually spend more time attacking FIRE, falsely claiming it has created a “moral panic” about campus censorship. There are left-wing professors FIRE successfully represented in court, who later attack FIRE on social media, falsely claiming “cancel culture is not real.” They are happy when conservatives and centrists lose their jobs for saying something that’s not woke.
On progressive websites such as Bluesky, FIRE is constantly criticized and condemned, while the ADF is rarely mentioned.
The ADF is bigger than FIRE and has brought more First Amendment lawsuits. But FIRE is much more active than ADF in advocating freedom of speech to the general public, citing Judge Learned Hand’s observation that “Liberty lives in the hearts and minds of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no law, no court can save it.” Leftists like Jason Stanley are very angry about FIRE publicly criticizing censorship by leftist college administrators, and angry at FIRE for pointing out that such censorship is commonplace. Leftists often censor campus dissent. As the head of FIRE explains, “One in six professors say they’ve either been punished for speech or threatened with punishment for speech. If extrapolated nationally, that would equal about 100,000 to 150,000 professors. There is no historical parallel where the number is as bad,” not even during the McCarthy Era. Campus censorship is overwhelmingly committed by the left.
Leftists resent FIRE’s criticism of left-wing censorship on campus, and want to punish FIRE the next time the Democratic Party retakes the White House. As a progressive Bluesky user put it, “every FIRE employee should be persecuted by the Reconstruction II government like Tom Homan himself.” 116 people on Bluesky liked this post, and 11 people reposted it, including a purportedly libertarian professor in Montreal who has advocated left-wing legislation such as Biden’s failed Build Back Better plan and attacked a publication that criticizes campus censorship. (The Build Back Better plan would have spent trillions of dollars America doesn’t have. It was blocked by Republicans and two centrist Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema).
Leftists’ desire to treat FIRE like Tom Homan is an example of how they hate centrists just as much as conservatives, even when the centrist has little in common with conservatives. Tom Homan is in charge of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation effort. By contrast, FIRE has filed court briefs opposing the Trump administration’s deportation of foreign students for anti-Israel speech.
Left-wing social media such as Bluesky are full of arguments that when the Democrats take over America again in 2028, they should radically transform American, subjecting it to a radical reconstruction. That radical change includes packing the Supreme Court, removing conservative Supreme Court justices, and enacting left-wing policies that would be of doubtful constitutionality under current Supreme Court precedent, such as imposing restrictions on philanthropy to free-market groups (which leftists deride as “dark money”), restricting corporate and campaign speech, restricting religious activity and autonomy, and overriding state voting laws.
Leftists often attack not just conservatives, but also what they call the “reactionary center” and “heterodox centrists,” a category that leftists define to include civil-liberties groups such as FIRE that defend the constitutional rights of conservatives, or criticize censorship by the woke left.
Leftists live in a bubble where they can avoid being exposed to centrist or conservative views: “The social media platform Bluesky” — where many journalists and academics hang out — “is so left-leaning that users block criticism of the Hunter Biden pardon as beyond the pale, even as they celebrate the murder of CEOs.”
Contrary to its storied past, the ACLU brings rather few First Amendment lawsuits these days, and doesn’t much care about free speech anymore, unless it is the free speech of a large ACLU donor or powerful progressive interest group. A leading ACLU official who argues cases before the Supreme Court called for banning a book, and the ACLU defended banning a man from uttering racial slurs while in his own home (appellate courts upheld the ban in the workplace, but not in the man’s own home).
ACLU chapters in places like Massachusetts have actually drafted model speech codes to restrict college students’ free speech rights, and state ACLU affiliates have advocated restricting the free speech rights of the Koch Brothers, religious speakers, and the speech of corporations and nonprofits. The ACLU has more money and staff lawyers than either FIRE or the ADF, but few of those ACLU lawyers work on First Amendment issues, and the ACLU is happy to let FIRE represent most left-wing faculty whose free speech rights are violated, rather than doing it itself. When one of the more conservative FIRE officials was asked why his group represented left-wing people persecuted for their speech, rather than letting the ACLU do it, the FIRE official explained that these days, the ACLU typically declines to represent censorship victims, even when they are progressive, choosing instead to focus its resources on bringing lawsuits over discrimination, reproductive rights, LGBT rights, and progressive causes instead. As a result, FIRE is sometimes the only place willing to provide free legal assistance to a progressive whose First Amendment rights have been violated. By contrast, Conservatives can seek representation from the ADF, Speech First, the Institute for Free Speech, and Defending Education. But not the ACLU, which seldom is willing to represent conservatives, with the noteworthy exception of NRA v. Vullo (2024).
