A former American Civil Liberties Union president suggested former President Barack Obama was a “terrible president” when it came to free speech issues, during a Friday interview.
Former ACLU president and author Nadine Strossen made the remark during a phone interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation about the ACLU’s efforts with regard to free speech on college campuses going back to the 1990s.
“I still think a lot of liberals aren’t aware [of] what a terrible president [Obama] was,” Strossen told TheDCNF, alluding to the fact that the former president used the Espionage Act to pursue whistleblowers more times than all previous presidents had combined. But she also praised Obama for encouraging students to engage in discussion.
“I would say many people are more deeply engaged about politics and more concerned about their civil liberties,” the former ACLU president said, when asked to compare the state of free speech on campus under Obama to that under President Donald Trump.
Strossen is the author of the newly released book “HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship” and has toured college campuses both during and after her 1991–2008 tenure as ACLU’s president. She discussed the concept of hate speech with New York University law professor Jeremy Waldron, author of “The Harm in Hate Speech” at Cornell University in April.
“There has been so much push-back by liberals against free speech,” Strossen told TheDCNF. She surmised that this might be because liberals often argue that “high-profile beneficiaries [of free speech] are conservatives [but] that’s certainly no reason to not defend free speech at all.” – READ MORE
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