Not quite extinguishing a FIRE

In what those of us at the Daily News would call a megaturd, meaning an excessively long story, the Inquirer delivered this story with a mild expression of surprise that FIRE is taking on the government, meaning President Donald J. Trump and his minions.

FIRE is the acronym for the Philly-based nonprofit — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — of which I have been a fan for more than a decade.

In a key paragraph, staff writer Zoe Greenberg writes: “The question FIRE faces today is whether it can effectively meet the moment, and overcome skepticism from the left and from other free-speech advocates, some of whom argue the group helped lay the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.”

The story runs almost 5,000 words and names two, just two, critics, one of whom — a Penn State academic — basically addresses FIRE’s ranking of academic freedom on college campuses.

“Those critics,” the Inquirer insists, “say the present free-speech crisis” — which may exist, but it is stated with no supporting evidence — “is partly the predictable result of FIRE stoking a conservative panic over campus politics.”

Again, no supporting evidence of a “conservative panic,” with the reporting actually enumerating a number of campus free-speech cases won by FIRE.

I ask myself if the Inquirer would hold the ACLU or the Southern Poverty Law Center to the same scrutiny. My opinion is it would not, although I have. In 2022 I opined that ACLU had refocused from a balls-to-the-walls defense of free speech, to a selective array of woke hors d’oeuvres, and woke is not open to contrary views. And as my column reports, it’s not just me saying it, it’s also the liberal The New York Times.

I had reached the same conclusion earlier with the SPLC, which repeatedly drew no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants to this country.

When I first brought the comingling to their attention, they said they made a mistake. When it continued, I knew it was deliberate, and policy. I ended my financial support. 

Was I having a conservative panic?

I spent much of my life supporting liberal organizations, such as the ACLU and the SPLC. 

I did not change. They did.

So the Inquirer is free to float the notion that some unnamed “free-speech advocates” say FIRE “helped lay the groundwork for an authoritarian crackdown.” But just two paragraphs later it quotes FIRE legal director Will Creeley as pointing with alarm to “the power of the federal government,” which it has sued, along with local government, while defending its nemesis, Harvard University, from attacks by the Trump administration. The Inquirer admits that. The headline over the story admits FIRE is defending universities it has long criticized.

Were the original targets of FIRE, launched in 1999, liberal college campuses and their cancel culture?

Yes, and with reason. It was not a mirage.

If I were an Inquirer staffer, I might see the world as they do. But when I was, and I did not, I was not very popular in the newsroom, which had little consciousness of its own implicit bias. One editor actually denied to me that we worked in a liberal newsroom. I thought I was having an out-of-body experience. That was hours before I had my out-of-the-newsroom experience, forced retirement.

That the majority of MainStreamMedia leans left is undeniable. The bias of the left was spelled out by liberal journalist Kirsten Powers in a 2015 book, “The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech.” Her target was what she calls the illiberal left.

Mine, too. Along with the repressive right.

To be an advocate of free speech means advocating for speech with which you do not agree.

It takes no courage to defend opinions that match your own.

Courage is defending opposing points of view, even offensive ones.

I have a feeling some Inquirer editor — I have known a few — assigned a story with the intent of extinguishing FIRE.

Alas, the facts did not support it.