Defending civil liberties for Nazis doesn’t mean you like them

By Matthew Gagnon

Last summer, Maine was abuzz with talk of a neo-Nazi training ground being formed by white supremacist Christopher Pohlhaus in Springfield.

I think Pohlhaus is a sad, pathetic, hateful character — as tends to be the case for all white nationalists like him — who founded the organization Bluttstamm (Blood Tribe). He had recruited, at the time, a small number of like-minded racists to the state, and intended his facility to be used to train these individuals in the use of weapons and other physical training. Pohlhaus has since sold the property and is no longer in the state. 

The uncomfortable situation inspired a bill in the Maine Legislature to purportedly deal with “paramilitary training camps.” That bill passed by a single vote in the Maine House last week and by a more comfortable margin in the Senate on Tuesday. It now is on Gov. Janet Mills’ desk, awaiting her signature.

I’m always wary of “reactive” legislation, as a general rule. When something as justifiably troubling as a neo-Nazi training camp being established in the state occurs, the impulse can be to quickly “do something” about the situation, based on an understandable emotional reaction to the event. Those reactive types of bills are frequently ill-considered, unnecessary and used for rhetoric in our increasingly vitriolic political trench warfare, rather than to make good policy.

In this case, though, there were difficult questions to resolve, which deserved to be debated and dealt with. To what degree do we allow people with toxic, hate-motivated, violent viewpoints to gather together and prepare for an imagined (or worse, premeditated and pre-emptive) conflict? What role does motivation play in law? If this group were “training” because they expected black helicopters to come for them someday, is that materially different than if they intended to go on the offense and attack others in a racially motivated rampage? How do we deal with these same people engaging in the exact same training outside of centralized training compounds, like going to gun ranges and martial arts facilities? Is that even possible? 

And, of course, how do we protect cherished civil rights while trying to deal with this?

These are all incredibly important questions that deserve honest dialogue, and also deserve to be treated with the care that the issue — particularly the last question, which has implications for each and every one of us — deserves. Unfortunately, having that kind of conversation in the legislative arena is not really possible. 

While debating the issue last week, Rep. Laurel Libby stood up to object, bringing up her concerns with the bill’s potential for restricting rights for Mainers. “The bottom line is it doesn’t matter whether I agree or disagree with a group. It is my job to protect Mainers’ right to free speech and association as long as it doesn’t infringe on someone else’s right and as long as they’re not harming someone else. That is the proper role of government,” she said.

For her speech, she was politically attacked by the Maine House Democratic Campaign Committee with a deceptively edited video that made her sound like she was a Nazi sympathizer, painting her as a “MAGA extremist.”

That stunt was dishonest political grifting in the extreme. The core of Libby’s argument, even if you disagree with it, is ripped right out of the mind of Thomas Paine. “He that would make his own liberty secure,” Paine said in his “Dissertations on First Principles of Government,” “must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”

It is also the same argument employed by the American Civil Liberties Union in one of the most famous legal defenses of reprehensible people in American history. In the landmark 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the ACLU defended Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader against criminal charges in the state of Ohio, in response to a racist, incendiary public speech which the state considered violent and threatening. 

The ACLU argued, and the Supreme Court agreed, that Brandenburg’s speech was protected under the First Amendment. 

That defense of neo-Nazis and the Klan, incidentally, still happens. But that doesn’t make the ACLU either sympathetic to Nazis or “extremists.” It means that the organization believes that defending the rights of the most unpopular and universally rejected and opposed viewpoints and people is essential to securing the rights of the rest of us.

To suggest that someone who is making a similar argument either likes or supports people like Pohlhaus or his Blood Tribe is a truly reprehensible brand of politics.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.