CHAPTER 21

Author: Regarding your dad’s views on like, political correctness, freedom of speech and things like that, have you got any kinds of recordings of him or any kind of documentary evidence of him ever writing about it?

Noam: No, I don’t, but this is what you have to remember, in those days, that was the liberal opinion too. The American Civil Liberties Union, the gold standard of liberal views, went to court to defend the Nazis, their right to march on Skokie. They would never do that today. I actually … On one of my podcasts they had the former head of the Civil Liberties Union on, I don’t know if you heard it, and he said he didn’t think they would do it today. So when my father had those views about people being able to say whatever they want, and should say whatever they want, and let’s have a debate, let’s get a Holocaust denier in here, this was mainstream, and if anything, liberal views. I mean, you have to live through it to shudder at how it’s changed. When I went to college they invited Meir Kahane and Noam Chomsky and I mean any kind of radical guy. Nobody cared. Nobody cared. And they spoke and we saw the lectures and they were interesting and we didn’t become Nazis. But now, I know how he would feel about this, but it wasn’t an issue then, there was nobody saying anything about trigger warnings or anything like that.