OPINION:
Our Constitution’s premier amendment sanctioned the fringe New England organization NSC-131’s (National Social Club-Anti-Communist Action) small, short-lived April 1 demonstration in downtown Portland, Maine.
The freedom to speak one’s mind and peaceably gather to express grievances are sacrosanct rights afforded to all Americans, even members of NSC-131. This self-described brotherhood feels existentially threatened, and its members are stereotypically described as Hitlerian ideologues.
Based in Massachusetts, the nascent group, founded by 23-year-old Chris Hood, has been known to protest at drag queen story hours. And in 2022, its members waved “Keep Boston Irish” placards during the city’s St. Patrick’s Day parade.
A storm gathered around the anticipated 1978 march of neo-Nazis through the streets of Skokie, Illinois. Hearteningly, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a full-throated defense of the group’s right to appear in this Chicago suburb, which was heavily populated with Holocaust survivors.
The ACLU regarded neo-Nazis’ freedoms with symmetrical constitutional reverence rendered during the 1960s civil rights crusade in the Deep South. Similarly, on the 1980s and ’90s pop-culture plane, talk-show icons like Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera would televise multi-sided forums of combustible perspectives.
A Portland city councilwoman asked at what point is free speech punitively perverted by hate. One could reasonably pose a responding question: Is speech inviolably free, or is it, in fact, ideologically codified by whatever faction holds the power reins?
The American zeitgeist is inflamed with such bellicose views that old town-square soapbox days of diversely attended orated opinions are dead and gone: On college campuses around the country, conservative speakers are regularly impeded from speaking freely. Nationally recognized personalities like Charlie Kirk and Tomi Lahren — at the University of New Mexico, for example — have experienced virulent opposition to their opinions. And earlier this month, University of Kentucky star swimmer Riley Gaines, who recently shared a fifth-place finish at the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, was allegedly assaulted by trans rights activists at San Francisco State University, where Ms. Gaines spoke on the equitable integrity of women’s athletics.
In Portland, NSC-131 roused community indignation for the group’s de jure gathering. It is these same vociferously “affronted” people who demand laissez-faire receptivity to lifestyle and expect the untrammeled freedom to voice convictions, both individually and in an amplifying assemblage. But when a group holding an unpalatable ideology shows up on their doorstep, the welcome mat is hastily tossed. A curious cognate of xenophobia burgeons forth: bitter insularity in those self-regarding broad-minded people who claim to repudiate the notion.
In the wake of NSC-131’s Portland visit, community members have said they feel unsafe. This is an intriguing assertion given the statistics of Neighborhood Scout, whose pre-April 1 website data indicates that Portland is safer than only 22% of U.S. cities. It statistically cites the chances of being a violent crime victim as 1 in 449 in a city with a population of about 68,000.
It is puzzling that this newly acquired fear was absent in 2020, arguably the worst year of rioting in U.S. history. Nationwide Black Lives Matter and antifa demonstrations caused in excess of $2 billion in property damage, and over 2,000 police officers were injured. Pervasive calls to defund police departments led to an exodus of law enforcement and a tangential rise — approximately 60% in New York City and Chicago — in murder rates.
Portland newspapers that reported on the April 1 incident were disappointingly one-sided. There was scant background on NSC-131, and quotes were from distressed or expletive-spouting counterprotesters and an angry city councilwoman: Their utopian seaside enclave had been breached, not by Genghis Khan, but by displeasing beliefs.
These newspapers’ skewed perspective implicitly speaks to bias. And it unintentionally fuels individual feelings of societal alienation, contributing to the genesis of organizations like NSC-131. As former extremist Tony McAleer, co-founder of the nonprofit Life After Hate, explains, he joined because he “felt a sense of belonging where I felt invisible.”
The muscularity of our democracy requires a media that presents evenhanded facts. And as foregrounded by the April 1 commotion in Portland, our democracy must be religiously faithful to the egalitarian dispensation of constitutional rights.
• Scott R. Hammond, Boston.
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