Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara. On today’s special episode of Stay Tuned, I am joined by two guests, both happen to be named Glasser. First, New Yorker Staff Writer and CNN Global Affairs Analyst, Susan Glasser, joins me for discussion about the war in Ukraine.

Susan Glasser:

Vladimir Putin doesn’t just walk away when backed into a corner, and he escalates and he escalates, and he’s not hesitant to use the kinds of military force that we think of as absolutely abhorrent.

Preet Bharara:

Then we delve into free speech with Ira Glasser, who served as the Executive Director of the ACLU from 1978 all the way until 2001.

Ira Glasser:

The driving passion that brought me to the ACLU was racial justice. That was the most important, my most important issue growing up and that was what I cared most about during the years I was at the ACLU. So every time I defended somebody’s right to say racist things, I was obligated to defend their right to say it, but I was also obligated to disagree with what they said.

Preet Bharara:

That’s coming up, stay tuned. Hey folks, Preet here. I have an exciting announcement. On Thursday evening, March 31st, we’re bringing Stay Tuned to New York City’s Town Hall for our first in-person show since before the pandemic. Yes, I said in-person. I’ll be joined by actor and producer Ben Stiller. As always, I’ll answer audience questions and reflect on the latest news making the headlines. You won’t want to miss it. Join me, Ben, and your fellow fans by heading to cafe.com/events to get your tickets. That’s cafe.com/events. I really hope to see you there.

Preet Bharara:

As the world’s eyes are focused on Ukraine, Russia has intensified its attacks on cities across the country, including on civilian life. A UN Refugee Agency forecasts that up to a million people could flee Ukraine for neighboring countries in the coming days. Meanwhile, President Putin finds himself increasingly isolated as US and international allies join forces to rally around President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Biden, assailed Putin and promised retaliation.

Joe Biden:

Putin has unleashed violence and chaos. But while he may make gains on the battlefield, he’ll pay a continuing high price over the long run.

Preet Bharara:

Susan Glasser has spent many years reporting from Russia, where she served as Moscow’s Co-Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. She was also previously Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine. She now writes for the New Yorker and is CNN’s Global Affairs Analyst. Susan Glasser, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Susan Glasser:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So we’re about a week into the Ukraine crisis. And after about a week, it seems to me that no one predicted we would be at this point. Putin got it wrong, the experts seems to seem to have gotten it wrong. I don’t know if Joe Biden got it wrong. And the key question or one of the key questions to me and to other people is, we used to think, “Well, how bad is the world order going to be and the European order going to be if Putin succeeds in a quick blitz and takes over a sovereign independent country like Ukraine?” And now it seems to be the issue that people are worried about is, “What happens when Putin continues to fail to do the thing that we thought he was going to do quickly?” Is a losing Putin more scary and worrisome than a winning Putin? What do you think about that?

Susan Glasser:

Well, short answer, right, the crisis is a week old and also 20 years in the making. And so I think part of the thing that’s so alarming to people who’ve been following this whole two decade arc is Vladimir Putin doesn’t just walk away when back into a corner, and he escalates, and he escalates, and he’s not hesitant to use the kinds of military force that we think of as absolutely abhorrent. And so that’s one-

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean, Susan? Because you’re scaring me.

Susan Glasser:

Well, first of all, it means devastating European cities in Kyiv, Kharkiv, who knows, he might even go after Lviv in the west. I don’t think so, but it’s possible. It means leveling them. Look at a picture of Grozny, look at a picture of Aleppo after the Russian military was done with it. And I don’t think people have fully absorbed what that will feel like and what it means politically and geopolitically. So that’s number one is Putin is an escalator. Number two, regime survival has always been his biggest priority. And that’s why you’re seeing an enormous domestic crackdown inside Russia. It accompanies, his aggression, outside the country, it always. And to the extent that Putin genuinely has backed himself into a situation where his own survival as Russia’s leader is threatened ,well, that’s his red line and that takes us into a whole different realm of escalation.

Preet Bharara:

So what’s he waiting for? Why isn’t Kyiv already leveled?

Susan Glasser:

Well, first of all, it is only a week into the campaign. And remember that Kyiv held out during World War II against the Nazis for more than a month. And even the US blitzkrieg toward Baghdad, which included [Shakina 00:06:00] air superiority, took a few days. So it’s way too early to draw military conclusions, especially because of what I just said, which is that Vladimir Putin is willing to take measures that many other leaders, even in a war situation, are not.

Susan Glasser:

And so what we’re looking to see right now is evidence that they’re adjusting their battle plan and their tactics because of the initial failed blitzkrieg type assault on Ukraine cities. And there’s some evidence that they’re doing that, they’re beginning bombardment of the cities, attacking civilian areas, using more firepower that they held out of the fight the first few days. So if they do that, then we’ll see if that meets with more success.

Preet Bharara:

What’s going on with this convoy that we keep hearing about.

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, that is quite a visual. And I think it underscores one very odd fact of this war so far, which is the skies have remained contested but neither side seems to have dominated in a way you might expect, right? If Ukraine was still in charge of the airspace, you would imagine that they would just, it’s a sitting duck type target, right? So why not just eviscerate it? So clearly they don’t either have the resources or the access or both you that. If Russia were truly unchallenged though, you wouldn’t be seeing continued evidence of literally fighter jet dog fights in the skies, which the military analysts are continuing to report. So is that an invasion column? Is it a sign of Russia’s screwed up logistics and they don’t have the capacity or the fuel or whatever to keep going? It may be all of the above.

Preet Bharara:

Can we get into Putin’s brain a little bit more?

Susan Glasser:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

By all accounts, he seems to be more isolated than ever before. That’s even reflected in these pictures we get of him sitting in at like a 30 foot long table. The table’s as long as the convoy it seems like.

Susan Glasser:

That’s right. Talk about Kremlinology. When we grew up right in the cold war, you and I, Preet, it’s like, I remember, people talk about Kremlinology and how the CIA was filled with analysts who were counting how many people were on the podium at the Kremlin for the annual May Day parade and who was sitting next to whom? And here we’re right back to that, we have had very little, I think, accurate understanding in recent years of Putin and how he makes decisions and who’s influential. But the visuals are incredible. They show us a man in extreme isolation, willing to berate subordinates, including the head of the GRU, the Russian foreign intelligence by service, sorry, the SVR, right on camera. And what does that tell us? What it tells us, he wants to assert dominance as a very traditional macho male Russian posturing, demonstrations not just of strength but of over the top caricature type strength, but also of a feeling of some vulnerability.

Preet Bharara:

Is he going to play hockey anytime soon?

Susan Glasser:

Well, my guess is now all subordinates are-

Preet Bharara:

Maybe He can shoot nine goals and-

Susan Glasser:

Well, he’ll have to invite Lukashenko from Belarus, also famous for playing hockey and then force Lukashenko to throw the game to him.

Preet Bharara:

So clearly Putin underestimated Ukraine, the people. He underestimated was Zelensky. He underestimated the alliance of the Europeans and the rest of the west. He underestimated, I think, probably what some corporations would do. You have Finland, Sweden, even Switzerland, doing things that probably a couple of weeks ago wouldn’t have been predicted. You have Germany deciding after decades of being encouraged and urged to do so, finally increasing its defense budget to over 2% of GDP. My question is, the fact that he’s so miscalculated and underestimated all these parties, what does that say about, in your mind, the advice he’s getting going forward, now that he finds himself a little bit in the hole?

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question because like all dictators who’ve been in power for a long time, it’s not only increasing isolation but it seems that Vladimir Putin has begun to believe his own propaganda. And we used to joke in college, but I think it’s relevant to this here, you’re really in trouble when you start lying to yourself and believing it. And he has told himself some lies that are crazy about Ukraine. He has a vision of the collapse of the Soviet Union that has created a world view of grievance and revenge and the idea that he will be the great modern day Tsar who will essentially revise the unacceptable terms, as he sees them, of the post cold war piece. That the Soviet Union was forced to break up by hostile external forces and it was at the barrel of a gun as he saw it. And now Russia is strong again, and he’s not going to accept it. And he doesn’t accept a legitimacy of Ukraine as an independent state.

Susan Glasser:

And for me Preet, the idea that there would be a Jewish President of Ukraine after that country’s horrific history of Pogroms and anti-sematic violence and the killing fields of the Nazis literally bombed yesterday by Putin himself and [Pabayar 00:00:11:32]. And the idea that Ukraine would’ve overcome its past enough to have a Jewish president like Zelensky and then to have Vladimir Putin claim that he’s “liberating Ukraine” from its Nazi leader, the Jewish president. I mean, this is just a man who is delusional.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but does he really believe that or does he know it’s BS and that’s the propaganda he’s intentionally putting forward? I never understand. What do you think he believes and what do you think he understands is nonsense?

Susan Glasser:

That is a great question not just for Putin but for many of those public figures who spew BS at us in the United States and elsewhere. I think that he does not think that Vladimir Zelensky is an actual Nazi and that is propaganda. I think that he does however truly and deeply believe that Ukraine and Russia are one country and more or less one people. And that it’s his refusal to accept the legitimacy of Ukraine as a separate entity that is at the base of this. So I believe that he believes that, yes.

Preet Bharara:

Well here’s another thing that he’s said and done. He’s put his nuclear capability on more active alert. The United States to did not match that, didn’t increase the DEFCON level. Was that the right thing to do in response and how seriously should we take Putin’s repeated references to his nuclear arsenal?

Susan Glasser:

Yeah. So this is a question, as you might imagine, that it’s just been gripping the small world of people who pay attention to Russia and nuclear issues for days. And I have to say it’s been an alarming series of conversations I’ve heard in part because it actually is Russian military doctrine to include the potential use of what we might call tactical nuclear weapons, battlefield nukes, I think the experts call it nonstrategic weapons. That is part of their doctrine. In fact, their annual military exercises, the zapad exercises, zapad means west, by the way, in Russian, have included scenarios whereby it escalates to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So it’s not some crazy thing that’s invented.

Susan Glasser:

And the flip side is I think for Vladimir Putin, that nuclear status has been a part of his rhetoric and of his grievance-filled narrative about the west for as long as I can remember. So it’s not the first time he’s used nuclear sabre-rattling, Preet, so that’s one thing and it’s really generally served as a kind of petulant reminder of Russia’s superpower status and don’t treat us as just some pointless regional power as Barack Obama referred to Russia, because those nukes ought to give them status and prestige on the world stage. So it’s not the first time he’s resorted to this kind of rhetoric, but in this situation where miscalculation is so extremely possible, I think it’s much more worrisome than I’ve ever heard it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s comforting Susan.

Susan Glasser:

Well, he’s at war with us, Preet, whether we are at war with him or not, right? So that’s the thing that’s the most scary is not even this sort of strategic, nonstrategic weapons thing. It’s the idea that, for Putin, we may have already crossed is red line, right? So I think President Biden, other Western leaders have been very focused and correctly so on trying to message to Moscow, “Listen, we are not sending our troops in, we’re not going to war with you, we understand, and we don’t want to risk World War III. However, in Putin’s mind, there’s the possibility, by sending so much military aid that he possibly didn’t expect from Europe, this issue of are fighter jets going to come from Poland or not, this could, in his mind, constitute NATO attacking him, even if we don’t see it as that. And that’s where things get really scary.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, it does. Let me ask you about President Zelensky for a moment. He’s become, for good reason, a hero and a model of courage and patriotism in his country, and he is rallied the people of Ukraine. Does Vladimir Putin, you think, and I realize these questions are difficult because you’re not Vladimir Putin, thankfully, and it requires some mind reading, but do you think he wants Zelensky dead or just removed? What would happen if Zelensky is martyred in some way by Russian forces?

Susan Glasser:

When you start war, the facts on the ground change things. And a week ago, Vladimir Zelensky was not an international badass hero, and now he is. And I think that changes things. There’s credible reports from US intelligence and others, the Ukrainians have said publicly, that the Russians were in fact mounting a assassination plot, that their goal was to decapitate the Ukrainian government and to replace it with a public government. That does appear to be what their plan was. Certainly, it’s consistent with the Russian playbook we’ve seen in other places, at other times historically.

Susan Glasser:

So I don’t doubt that Putin started out with the goal of ousting the government in Kiev and getting rid of Zelensky however he could. But the thing is that a week ago, President Zelensky was not a global icon and a decapitation strike on the government seems like a much more osculatory and inflammatory thing. Now, of course it always would’ve been, but it’s rare that the world gets to see the kind of heroism and defiance and leadership that we’re seeing right now from essentially an ordinary person.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, well he was a comedian and I’ve seen all his old clips, including the Ukrainian Dancing With The Stars.

Susan Glasser:

Oh, did you see that? Isn’t that unbelievable? That pink jumpsuit/

Preet Bharara:

But part of what has gone wrong for Putin, happily for the rest of us, is because he’s moved in slow motion and it’s taken a week to even get to this point, the suspense has built and the record has been made of heroism, not just on the part of Zelensky, but also the military folks. I mean, ordinary citizens who are arming themselves and who are chanting about their own country and their independence and who are taunting and yelling at the Russian soldiers saying, “These are our streets, this is our city, this is our country.”

Preet Bharara:

And it takes a while sometimes for these scenes to sink in to the minds and hearts of the rest of the world, and that’s been allowed to happen. If he had gone in and in two days sewn it all up, the world wouldn’t have reacted in the same way. And it seems to me, there’s a snowball effect that, at first, people were skeptical about what sanctions would do and whether they would hold. Now you got everybody coming out of the woodwork, random companies, not random companies, but companies, BP and others, everyone wants to get in on, it seems to me because it’s the right good, moral, popular thing to do, everyone wants to get in on punishing Russia in some way. Was that expected at all?

Susan Glasser:

I think you’re seeing exactly what you said, a pile on effect. Look at the Republicans. This is a classic example.

Preet Bharara:

Oh yes. Let’s talk about them.

Susan Glasser:

Okay. So one week ago, “Putin is a genius,” says the leader of their party. “He’s savvy, he’s brilliant, he’s getting Ukraine for just a couple dollars worth of sanctions.” Their propaganda are repeating and amplifying this message, either, “What is Ukraine have to do with me? Or Putin is my hero because he’s a international conservative warrior or something.” And so now they’re all put yellow and blue flags on their Twitter icons. I mean, it’s incredible.

Preet Bharara:

But you wrote something very interesting just this morning, you wrote about the State of the Union address. I wanted hear what you think about it before we go. But you said the Republicans all now seem, I’m paraphrasing, the Republicans all now seem to stand with Ukraine but not with Biden. How interesting is that?

Susan Glasser:

Yeah, I’ve been really struck by that. And of course that is a sign of a divide and a crisis inside our democracy, which by the way, I think this is so important for people to understand, that is a part of what almost certainly informed Putin’s miscalculation here. He listened to this rhetoric for years from Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

He watched Tucker.

Susan Glasser:

He watches Fox news, I don’t know. He believes, and he’s not incorrect, that America is a society that is weakened, that is divided against itself, that has had two years of a pandemic in which almost a million Americans have died despite the vaccine. And he’s listened to Biden say, essentially, “I’m not that concerned.” That was Biden’s focus at the beginning of his presidency was on just sort of putting Russia in a box, creating a “stable and predictable” relationship so that he could pivot to Asia and focus on the challenge from China. And so Biden and Trump in a way Putin took in this idea of the crisis of American democracy. And we can’t even have accountability for those who stormed our own capital on January 6th. So what do we care about storming somebody else’s capital? And I think that is a key part.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a guy running for Senate who I think is horrifying and has had about face, JD Vance said five days ago, “What do I care what happens to Ukraine?” And the other crazy thing, further to what you were saying a second ago, is not only does Putin see the divisiveness, if he looks at any of the polling, and I think you cite to this also in your piece, Vladimir Putin polls better among Republicans, one of the two major parties in this country, he pulls better among Republicans than Joe Biden does. So how can you blame him for thinking that a swath of the American public would be with him on this because people say they don’t care what happens to Ukraine and a lot of them find him to be powerful and strong and a better leader than their own dually elected president. It’s kind of nuts.

Susan Glasser:

Yeah. And look, by the way Preet, this is not one week in making, this is years in the making. The reason that Joe Biden is more unpopular with Republicans than Vladimir Putin, that’s a metric I’ve been tracking for a number of years. It’s not just happened in the last few weeks. It’s the President, the former President of the United States, praising Vladimir Putin over and over again, telling his voters that not only was Putin not a threat, but that we should reach accommodation with him, and again, and again, praising his leadership, his strength, even his “values”. And this had a corrosive effect. And what it showed was the ability of one of America’s two major political parties to have not a majority perhaps, but a very large faction of that party become not just not anti-Putin, but pro-Putin.

Susan Glasser:

And that’s something that’s really hard to imagine. I mean we’ve had figures like Trump and Tucker Carlson in the past, but they were never in a position of power and control over an entire political party. Charles Lindberg was an outside figure when he was leading the America First Movement before the Second World War and praising Hitler and saying, “We should come to accommodation with him.” He never was the leader of the Republican party.

Preet Bharara:

Quickly before you have to go and expound your wisdom on many other outlets, what did you make of Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, specifically on the issue of Ukraine? Did he spend too much time on it, not enough time on it? Was he strong on it? What’s your assessment?

Susan Glasser:

I think Biden has been clear eyed and strong since this crisis began. I think they did an extraordinary amount of diplomatic heavy lifting to get the Europeans in advance on board with sanctions, to warn the world very clearly in a very unusual way, actually, using real time American intelligence. They warned the world what was going to happen. And what was amazing to me actually was how many people didn’t believe them in the United States on both the left, by the way, and the right, there were people who didn’t take what the Biden Administration said seriously enough. There were people in Europe as well as Ukraine itself.

Susan Glasser:

And so Biden was strong on that. He’s been strong in saying all the right things about Putin’s aggression being countered. I thought the speech laid that out clearly. What it wasn’t was a kind of rallying cry for this new world of geopolitics that we find ourselves in. It was very Biden. And the moment I think of America and insecurity, what was his takeaway line about Ukraine and Russia? It was to Americans, “We are all going to be okay.” Ie, don’t worry about new clear war. That doesn’t give us a framework for what could be a long haul confrontation in Europe between Russia and the west. So that’s something to be determined.

Preet Bharara:

Can I say one final thing to you before you go?

Susan Glasser:

Yes, of course.

Preet Bharara:

Go get them.

Joe Biden:

Go get them.

Susan Glasser:

What does it mean? What does it mean?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know what that meant. I thought it was a great and strong speech and I think he came across as a good and unifying leader. But there was that thing at the end, go get him. I don’t know who that is but I’m going to figure it out. And when I figure it out, I’m going to go get him.

Susan Glasser:

Hey, is it Putin? Is it you go Ukrainians? Is it to his own democratic party? Is it to America? I guess it’s Coach Biden.

Preet Bharara:

I think it’s a version of up and at them. I don’t know who them is in that phrase either but I’m going to go get them.

Susan Glasser:

Go get them

Preet Bharara:

Susan Glasser, thank you so much for on short notice coming and talking to us about very, very fraught and important issue and I hope we’ll talk again soon.

Susan Glasser:

Thank you Preet, it’s an honor to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

It’s time for a short break, stay tuned.

THE IRA GLASSER INTERVIEW:

Preet Bharara:

Ira Glasser served as Executive Director of the ACLU for more than two decades. Under his leadership, the organization grew to become the nation’s leading force and defense of free speech. Glasser’s support of the first amendment saw the ACLU increasingly take on cases defending the most unsavory among us, including neo-Nazis and Klansmen, in order to preserve for everyone the right to speak freely. We discussed how Glasser, a trained mathematician, went on to lead the ACLU. Why Bobby Kennedy urged Glasser to pursue a job in defense of civil liberties, and a documentary about his life and career called Mighty Ira. Ira Glasser, welcome to the show, it’s so good to have you.

Ira Glasser:

Thank you. Good to be here.

Preet Bharara:

How are you?

Ira Glasser:

I’m good for an aging hippie.

Preet Bharara:

Aging hippie. Are there a lot of those?

Ira Glasser:

Well, there were a lot of hippies once but not too many of them have aged well.

Preet Bharara:

Aged well, that’s an interesting caveat. That’s an interesting hedge. We all age but not everyone ages well. Well, you’ve aged very well.

Ira Glasser:

Well, some people stop aging that’s not so good either.

Preet Bharara:

Right, I take your point.

Ira Glasser:

Right?

Preet Bharara:

That’s an excellent point. We’re here.

Ira Glasser:

We’re here.

Preet Bharara:

Started at the bottom, now we’re here.

Ira Glasser:

Every day I look at the obit pages and I’m glad that I don’t see my name there.

Preet Bharara:

That would be neat if you did because it would be some write up I think. So I’m going to start off with what is probably a very easy question or an easy answer for you, but my question is, within the Constitution. What is the most important right that Americans have?

Ira Glasser:

Well.

Preet Bharara:

Not so easy.

Ira Glasser:

No, it’s not so easy because I’ve always sort of been resistant to ranking rights but I think it’s probably fair to say that without the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly both rights and codified in the first amendment to the Constitution, without those rights, all the other rights would be very difficult to enforce because vulnerable people, oppressed people, subjugated people, whether you’re talking about blacks or women or gays or people organizing labor unions or whatever, they all start out from a position of powerlessness and vulnerability and free speech is the weapon, the only weapon, that they have not only to protest, but to call attention to their plight and to try to gather support from other people in the country to remedy their plight.

Ira Glasser:

And if they’re not allowed to speak, if they’re not allowed to meet, if they’re not allowed to distribute leaflets, if they’re not allowed to demonstrate, then their subjugation becomes a secret that only they know and it’s impossible ever to change. So it’s fair to say that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and freedom of protest and freedom of dissent are foundational rights because it’s very difficult to get access to all the other rights without those first amendment freedoms.

Preet Bharara:

How about freedom of religion, also in the first amendment?

Ira Glasser:

Well, freedom of religion was foundational in the 18th century when the first amendment was adopted. It was foundational in the sense that the only real diversity, I mean, you have to remember that we call ourselves a democracy, but in 1789, when the Constitution was adopted and the country began, the only people who had a right to vote were white men who owned property. Blacks of course were slaves. American natives, Indians, had no rights. Women couldn’t vote and even white men who didn’t own property couldn’t vote. So the only real diversity in the country was a diversity of religious beliefs. And so it was really important for minorities within the polity, religious minorities to have the freedom of religion or otherwise they would’ve been oppressed by religious majorities. So it was very foundational at the time because religious diversity was really the only kind of diversity that existed in that fledgling democracy of the late 18th century.

Ira Glasser:

Today, freedom of religion and keeping the government out of religion remains a foundational right, but it’s not as critical to most minorities, it wasn’t critical to labor unions, it wasn’t critical to women fighting for of the right to contraception in the early part of the 20th century. So it’s not as foundational now as it was in the 18th century, which doesn’t mean it isn’t important, it’s still a critical right. But I think when you say that all social justice movements require freedom of speech in order to get off the ground in order to make their plight known, that doesn’t include religious rights these days in the way that it did in the 18th century.

Preet Bharara:

One more question about religion. You talked about keeping government out of religion, the establishment clause, separation of church and state. Is it my imagination or are there greater calls from people on the right, some of whom are running for office, greater calls to erase the separation of church and state, people talking about one religion. What’s your reaction to that?

Ira Glasser:

Well, I think the establishment clause has been substantially weakened, mostly by the Supreme Court. The fact that is that religious freedom is now being used as an excuse to deny other people other rights. The most notable examples, of course, involve women and the right to contraception and abortion. If you want to buy contraceptives and you go into a drug store to buy contraceptives and the druggist just says, “Oh no, I have a religious objection to birth control. I’m not selling you” The question is who’s religious right is it? Is it the right of the person who wants to buy the contraceptives or is it the right of the person whose religious beliefs say, “I can’t sell it to you?”

Ira Glasser:

And it’s a public accommodation. I mean, supposing they said, “I have a religious belief that blacks are inferior so I’m not going to serve you.” Well, the Civil Rights Laws wouldn’t allow that. But if they say, “I have a religious belief that the use of birth can control is immoral and therefore I’m not going to sell this to you,” they often do have a right. And the Supreme court has enlarged that right?

Ira Glasser:

And the fundamental right to freedom of religion involves two kinds of rights. It involves one, what we call the establishment clause of the first amendment, which says that the government not favor religion over non-religion. And it involves religious freedom, the right to exercise your beliefs, but not in a way that denies other people their right to exercise their beliefs. So that, for example, if you look at the issue of school prayer, supposing kids are sitting around in school, in high school, in the school cafeteria and eating lunch, and some kids want to say grace before they eat because their religion requires them to do so. They have a right to do that.

Ira Glasser:

But if the school requires everybody in the school to say grace over the school loud speaker systems, and that includes people, students, who don’t believe in saying grace, then it’s their religious freedom that’s being interfered with by the requirement that they say grace. So what you have to do is balance those two things so that the kids who want to pray before they eat have the right to do so and the kids don’t want to pray before they eat, have the right not to pray. And that’s the line that you have to draw.

Preet Bharara:

That’s the problem with all issues when there are conflicts in principles or in values and in rights.

Ira Glasser:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Balance, how do you balance? Can we take a step back and talk about you for a minute? I learned a good bit about you in the last number of days by watching a film, a documentary, called Mighty Ira, which is about you.

Ira Glasser:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And one thing I had not appreciated about you, obviously I’ve known about you for a very long, time is that you graduated from college with a degree in mathematics, you did not become a lawyer, and yet you ran the the American Civil Liberty Union for some 23 years, which is all about litigating some of these issues that we’re talking about it. How does a math major, non-lawyer come to that position?

Ira Glasser:

Well, it’s interesting. I was the fifth executive director of the ACLU since it began in 1920. And four of the five of us were not lawyers, including the guy who started the ACLU, Roger Baldwin. If you’re looking to enforce the bill of rights, law is a major weapon obviously, but it’s not a weapon whose use is limited to lawyers. I used to joke that I represented civilian control over the lawyers on the ground that you couldn’t trust. You couldn’t trust social justice to the lawyers anymore than you can trust war to the generals. And the basic rights that people get to exercise, most people exercising their rights in society are not lawyers. They understand that if they want to go outside and hold up a poster that says something about a politician, they have a right to do so. They know that without being lawyers. They may need a lawyer to help them enforce their right but they don’t have to be a lawyer in order to understand what the right is about or its importance.

Ira Glasser:

So, the ACLU became identified with lawyers really during the period of the Warren Court years from about the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s when the Supreme Court for the first and only time in its history became protective of the Bill of Rights and therefore litigation became a primary weapon. And so it became identified, over-identified really, with lawyers and I almost didn’t come to work for the ACLU when I was offered the job back in ’67.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. I was going to ask you if you have a very fascinating story about the person who advocated that you take the job, who was that?

Ira Glasser:

Well, that was Bobby Kennedy, Senator Kennedy at the time from New York, and it was a conversation that I had with him because I was editing a magazine at the time, public affairs called Current. And this was in 1966, ’67, somewhere around there.

Preet Bharara:

And you just called up and said, “Hey, Bobby, what should I do?”

Ira Glasser:

Yeah, right. You can get a Senator on the phone just like that, right? And I wanted to come work for him. I thought he was the most fascinating politician out there. I thought that he combined a passion for racial justice, which was for me the most important issue growing up, and I thought he had a better understanding of that and a better passion for it than anybody else. So I spent a long time writing letters and calling the office and trying to get an appointment with him.

Preet Bharara:

You were stalking Senator Robert Kennedy.

Ira Glasser:

I was, I guess I was.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s your free speech right.

Ira Glasser:

And years later when I was at the ACLU, and it was a relatively easy matter to meet with the United States Senator. I appreciated how really delusional I was at the age of 28 thinking I could just write a letter and get an appointment with-

Preet Bharara:

But you weren’t because you got an audience with him.

Ira Glasser:

Well, I was persistent. The most I learned later that the most important virtue in the fight for any kind of justice is stamina and persistence. And I just kept writing and I kept talking and I kept calling, and finally, maybe to get rid of me, he agreed to meet. And I went down and I met with him alone in his office. He was getting a haircut at the time by the Senatorial barber and I was sitting there with him in his office, talking about why I thought he should run for President. And if he did, he was going to need more staff and why I thought he should hire me. I mean, it was the kind of say delusional arrogance that you can only have when you’re 25 or 26 years old. And of course he wasn’t ready to run for President at the time, but apparently he was interested in me enough so that he urged me to keep in touch.

Ira Glasser:

And then he asked me, “Well, what else are you going to do if you want to do something more active than edit a magazine?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t know. I had an offer to be Associate Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which we as the New York Branch of the ACLU, but I wasn’t inclined to take it because I wasn’t a lawyer. And it seemed to me that the ACLU issues were narrower in scope than my interests.”

Ira Glasser:

And he said to me, “No, you’re making a big mistake. You should consider that offer because the ACLU is a unique organization in American life, it’s the only organization that really is radical in the sense that it goes to the root of what American values are about, which is the Bill of Rights.” And I ended up rethinking it and I took the job thinking I would be there a year or two. And then when Kennedy announced about 14, 15 months later that he was running for President, I got back in touch with his staff to see if I could re-ignite an interest in helping and joining the staff. And then of course he was killed in the middle of the primary campaign and that’s pretty much how I got to stay at the ACLU.

Preet Bharara:

Earlier in the conversation, you said that one of the reasons the First Amendment is so important and has been such a focus of your life is exactly because it is that freedom that allows certain groups of people to get all the other rights that they are entitled to. And you refer to them as marginalized or disenfranchised, and I think you used the word vulnerable. Now, when you get to the issue of hate speech, so in that regard, the First Amendment is a shield and a protector of the vulnerable. But now when you get to hate speech, and you say that’s okay also, and I understand the legal argument. Does it ever bother you that hate speech is almost always directed specifically against the vulnerable?

Ira Glasser:

No, I’ll tell you why. It’s not a legal argument. I mean, it ends up being a legal argument, but here again, not being a lawyer, I’m going to make the political argument, the strategy argument.

Preet Bharara:

You could make the legal argument quite well, I’m sure.

Ira Glasser:

Anyway, but here’s the political strategic argument. The only important question, if you’re trying to decide whether speech should be banned, is not what the content of the speech is, it’s who gets to decide? Now if or I are in a position to decide which speech to permit and which speech to ban, then we would probably, I know I would certainly, permit all the social justice speech, all the speech I agree with. I have no interest in what the neo-Nazis speech is or what the Klan speech is. In fact, I hate everything that they say. And I think what they say is damaging. I think everything Trump said was damaging. I think everything Joe McCarthy said was damaging.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but you don’t have to take those cases. In other words, the ACLU has a choice. I don’t have a view on this and I tend to agree with you, but just to play devil’s advocate, you could decide as an organization, we care about free speech and you know what we’re going to defend the free speech rights of the vulnerable.

Ira Glasser:

No, I don’t think you can.

Preet Bharara:

Because it must be your view that vociferously and stridently defending the rights of people who hate Nazis and Klansmen and others, that in the long run, I take it, helps defend the rights of the vulnerable too. Is that the point?

Ira Glasser:

No, I’ll tell you why you can’t do that. You can’t do that because you can’t go into court and argue that the government doesn’t have the right to decide who gets to speak, unless you’re prepared to make that argument with speech that you don’t like. I’ll give you a real world example. This is the way the Skokie Case arose initially. There’s a place in Chicago called Marquette park, it’s in the Southwest side of Chicago and it’s bordered on one side by a predominantly poor black community, and it’s bordered on the other side by white ethnic, very conservative communities. And Marquette Park used to be, in the 1970s, a frequent place where demonstrations by both groups took place. The white ethnic groups would go into the park to demonstrate against school integration, against housing integration. This is right in the peak of the Civil Rights movement.

Ira Glasser:

And Civil Rights groups would come and they would demonstrate for integration and for housing integration and schools integration, and they would clash. And the cops always had to come out and keep them separate. And the city of Chicago got tired of it one day and they decided, “All right, you know what we’re going to do, no one gets to speak in Marquette park, unless you can post a $300,000 insurance bond in case any damage occurs to the park while these demonstrations are taking place in conflict with each other.”

Ira Glasser:

So in effect, both groups were banned because A, no insurance company would sell you a bond like that, and two, all these groups were poor and couldn’t afford an insurance bond, even if were available. And ACLU in Chicago regularly represented both of them from time to time. So after Chicago does this ban with the insurance bond, the Martin Luther King Jr association, which is one of the Civil Rights groups comes into the ACLU office, and says, “We want the right to demonstrate in this park the way we’ve always had, and would you challenge this insurance bond requirement? Because in effect, what it does is it bans us.”

Ira Glasser:

So the ACLU takes the case. And in taking the case, it argues in court that the government cannot have the power to require posting an insurance bond that nobody can afford as a precondition of free speech. That’s the argument that they make. Now a little bit later, that case is filed, it’s in court, the neo-Nazi group comes in to the ACLU offices and says, “We want you to do the same thing for us, challenge the insurance bond.” The ACLU says, “We don’t need to take this second case because if we win the case for the Martin Luther King Jr Association, we win it for you. You see? And if we lose it, we lose it for you because we can’t make the argument that the insurance bond requirement is okay against the neo-Nazi group, but not okay for the Martin Luther King Jr association. We have to make the argument that the government cannot restrict anybody’s speech by making them post an insurance bond as a condition of allowing the speech.”

Ira Glasser:

That’s our argument. So when we win it for the Martin Luther King Jr association, as I’m sure we will, we’ll win it for you too. Well, the neo-Nazis were not happy and they said, “How long is this going to take?” And well, litigation could take a long time it might even take a couple of years before all the appeals are through and all the rest of it. So the neo-Nazi group decides all the hell with this, we’re going to go and demonstrate in the suburbs where a lot of these people who are proposing integration in the schools live in the white suburbs…

Preet Bharara:

And where there’s no bond requirement.

Ira Glasser:

Right, and where there’s no bond requirements. So they write a letter to 12 suburbs of Chicago saying that they want to come demonstrate against integration and 11 of the suburbs ignore them, they just don’t respond. The one suburb that did respond was Skokie. Why? Because Skokie the home of very large population of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and the idea that people with swastika on their arms were going to come and demonstrate in their town was more than they could bear, understandably. So they went nuts and they…

Preet Bharara:

Understandably so, right?

Ira Glasser:

Right. Understandably so. So would I, so would you, so would anybody. And this neo-Nazi group was not a powerful group either, there were maybe 12, 15, 20 people. They were all kind of lunatics and they really were not a threatening movement of any kind. But the idea to somebody who had survived concentration camps and seen his whole family killed and was the only survivor, the idea that there was going to be people with swastikas marching through their streets was impossible.

Ira Glasser:

So the town of Skokie responded by saying, “No, you can’t come.” And then they convened their own city council, they passed an insurance bond requirement in Skokie, which had never existed before. They also passed a statute that said you couldn’t march in uniform in order to keep them from coming in with their Nazi-style uniforms. And ironically, that statute was used later in Skokie against the Jewish War Veterans who also marched in uniforms. So when they passed that, that prevented the neo-Nazi group from demonstrating in Skokie exactly as they had been prevented from demonstrating in Marquette Park in Chicago. And they said they were coming anyway. So then the town of Skokie went into court to enforce its own ban, which it had just passed, its own law.

Ira Glasser:

And the way in which the Skokie case got into court was not the neo-Nazi group going into court, not the ACLU going into court, it was the town of Skokie that went into court to enforce the ban. That case then became a parallel case to the ACLU’s case for the Martin Luther King Jr. Association in Chicago with the same issue in both cases, namely, can the government restrict speech through the use of the requirement of posting an insurance bond? And that’s how the cases got in effect consolidated. And the ACLU then took the Skokie case, which Skokie had initiated because it needed to do so in order to protect the argument it was making in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Now that’s why those kinds of things are inseparable. Unless you prepare to make the argument that the government can ban one kind of speech, but it can’t ban another kind kind of speech and that the government gets to decide which speech to ban and which speech to permit, which is way too dangerous, because why would anybody want Donald Trump making that decision?

Ira Glasser:

The speech that he hates is not the speech that you hate. So that’s how the Skokie case got into court. Now eventually, in both cases, in the one we started in Marquette Park in Chicago for the Martin Luther King Jr Association and in the one that the town of Skokie brought to try to stop the neo-Nazis for marching in Skokie, both cases, we ended up winning and the court ruled that towns cannot have cities, government cannot have the power to ban speech on the basis of requiring insurance bond requirements first and that the government can’t get to decide which speech to ban in which speech not to ban. And that’s the way in which those two different kinds of speech get linked. It has nothing to do with the content of the speech.

Preet Bharara:

No, I get that.

Ira Glasser:

It has to do whether government ever, whether it’s in anybody’s interest to give the government the power to decide which speech to permit and which speech to ban.

Ira Glasser:

That’s a completely and totally legally consistent argument and a strong argument because we have a First Amendment other countries don’t have that. My question though is, and you’ve grappled with this and we see some scenes relating to this in the documentary I mentioned Mighty Ira, when actual Holocaust survivors who are angry at the site or the prospect of people with swastikas coming marching in their neighborhood, when they complain about it and weep about it and confront you about it, how effective is your legal argument to them? And how do you deal with explaining to them, with whom you’re sympathetic, why you take the position you take.

Ira Glasser:

It’s very difficult. I made that argument that I just made to you to all kinds of groups, including, I went to synagogues and made that to groups of Jews here in New York, the most difficult thing, and the thing I never really did, I would never lecture a Holocaust victim on why he had to tolerate somebody in his neighborhood wearing a swastika. I could never bring myself to lecture a black person in Mississippi on why he had to allow even a peaceful demonstration of clan members in sheets and pillowcase marching through the streets where he lived. The pain that those people endured, the death that they endured, the injuries that they endured, makes the argument to them very difficult. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t benefit them. And eventually what happened was interesting.

Ira Glasser:

The guy who’s in the Mighty Ira film, Ben Stern, who I came to know only recently, who’s now like a hundred years old, survived seven concentration camps. He was arrested initially as a teenager in Poland. His entire family was wiped out, he never saw them again. He came to America from a refugee camp after World War II, he survived the death march. He got married, he had kids, he lived in Chicago and eventually he moved to Skokie. And he was living there in the late 1970s, 1977, when the Skokie case erupted, when the neo-Nazis wanted to March.

Ira Glasser:

And the town of Skokie tried to, as I described a moment ago, tried to ban the Nazis from coming unsuccessfully. But they also told Ben Stern and his fellow residents in Skokie, just go inside when they come, close the blinds and wait until they leave. And Ben Stern went crazy. He said later, “That’s what they told us in Poland. It’ll pass, just go inside and close your blinds and don’t pay any attention and it’ll pass.” He says, “I’m not listening to that argument anymore. It might not pass, it didn’t pass.” And he later said that he did something that he had never done in his life, he actually bought a gun. And he said, “I hate guns, I’m anti-gun.” But he actually bought a gun and learned how to use it because that’s how fearful he was about the consequences of neo-Nazis in his neighborhood.

Ira Glasser:

And he had more reason and done most. But he did something else. After we won the case for both the Martin Luther king Jr. Association in Chicago and the neo-Nazi group in Skokie, after we won the case, Ben Stern organized the counter demonstration, which the town of Skokie did not want him to do. They wanted him to remain quiet and remaining quiet was not something he was about to do. So he organized a counter demonstration. I think he had like 50,000 or 60,000 people ready to come to Skokie to demonstrate against the neo-Nazis if they came. And in the end, though the neo-Nazis won the right to come, they never came.

Ira Glasser:

And they never came in part because Stern organized a counter speech that would’ve drowned them out. So they went back to Chicago, they went back to Chicago where they came from, and organized the demonstration in Marquette Park which was the thing that started this all. And there was so much publicity, there had been so much publicity about the Skokie case by that time that a 100,000 people came out to demonstrate against them and it turned out to be a disaster for the neo-Nazi group.

Preet Bharara:

You can clear something else for us. So the ACLU’s mission and your job in part was if a Nazi wanted to march in a place where other people could march and display swastikas, that’s protected. If people want to say the N-word, in fact, in the same location, you hate it, you abhor it, but it’s constitutionally protected. If those same people do that in the workplace, employer has every right to terminate them, correct?

Ira Glasser:

Well, that depends.

Preet Bharara:

Private employer.

Ira Glasser:

Yeah, I know private employer. That depends on the context. For example, supposing somebody was sitting in a lounge in a workplace reading, Tom Sawyer, and somebody else saw them reading Tom Sawyer and Tom Sawyer has the forbidden word in it.

Preet Bharara:

Just to make it easier, I’m talking about a similar kind of negative use sporting of a swastika on a sleeve at the accounting firm in a clear pro-Nazi anti-semitic way. And I know there are probably hypotheticals at the margins, but as standard variety, racist at work or anti-semite at work, who’s advocating those kinds of views in a private work environment generally okay to be fired, right?

Ira Glasser:

Just wearing the SWAs or harassing somebody?

Preet Bharara:

How about just wearing the swastika?

Ira Glasser:

How about wearing the cross? How about a Catholic wearing the cross whose hostile [inaudible 00:58:19] Catholic work in an abortion clinic?

Preet Bharara:

Going back to the swastika for a moment. There are cases in which your saying the ACLU could and should defend an accountant, use the accountant example because it’s kind of mundane where the office may have general attire requirements, general requirements about how you interact with your employees. You’re saying there’s a strong case on behalf of the swastika wearer at the accounting firm?

Ira Glasser:

What I’m saying is that what you can’t allow is harassment of one employee by another, for any reason, for race, for gender, for political belief, for religious belief. But what I’m all also saying is that if you have a rule that says nothing can be worn which reflects a political or religious belief, nothing, nobody could wear anything. Then that’s one thing, that’s permissible rule I think.

Preet Bharara:

What if the swastika wearer, I’ll make it even harder or easier from your perspective?

Ira Glasser:

You allowed somebody to wear a Trump button?

Preet Bharara:

I’m trying to use a simple example that I think most people, I know it’s based on content, but I’m trying to use the extreme example of a pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish swastika wearing person. I’ll make it even more complicated, not somebody who comes to the accounting firm, but somebody who marches in a Nazi march wearing a swastika on his private time, that comes to the attention of the employer. Does that employer have a right to fire the anti-Semite or not?

Ira Glasser:

No.

Preet Bharara:

Under no circumstances. I believe that happens all the time and I haven’t seen the ACLU rush to represent them.

Ira Glasser:

Let me make it harder for you. Let me give you a real case that happened in 1973, ’74 at the ACLU. That was during the period post-Watergate where there was a movement arose to impeach Nixon, as you will recall. We were very primary in starting that movement, we ran an ad calling for the impeachment of Nixon because of his violation of civil liberties and his enemies list and his wire tapping and all the rest. We ran an ad in September of 1973, calling for impeachment before the campaign for impeachment really got started in Congress. And during that campaign, from the fall of ’73 to the summer of ’74 when Nixon resigned, as a result of the Congressional impeachment process, we ran a big campaign supporting impeachment throughout New York State. And by that, I mean, we went into congressional districts, we held meetings, we made speeches and so forth.

Ira Glasser:

And it caught fire and there were people supporting it, there were people opposing it. And one day we get a call from a guy who lived in upstate, mid-state New York someplace. And there had been a impeachment demonstration in his town on a Saturday. He was a factory worker working for some factory in town, Mondays through Fridays, the factory was closed on the weekend so he was on his own time on Saturday. And he participated in this impeached Nixon parade through the middle of town on a Saturday, off duty, off work. And his boss happened to see him in this parade. He comes in on Monday and he’s fired. Permissible?

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know all the facts. What happened?

Ira Glasser:

Well, he was fired. And he asked for our help. Now, of course, if he had been fired for a religious demonstration, we might have been able to help him because there was a statute that said you can’t fire somebody for religious reasons. But there is no statute that says you can’t be fired by a private employer for political reasons, so he was out of luck.

Preet Bharara:

Right. So why isn’t the swastika wearing accountant also out of luck. That’s not religion.

Ira Glasser:

That’s exactly right.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. All right.

Ira Glasser:

Exactly what I’m saying.

Preet Bharara:

I was worried earlier.

Ira Glasser:

No, what I’m saying is that when you asked me, is it all right for that person to be fired, and I said no, it’s legally, there’s nothing much you can do about it. But no, the ACLU would oppose the fire of somebody who was wearing a swastika in the street on Saturday and came to work and there was no job related reason to fire him but he was fired because the boss didn’t like his politics.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, I think some people would say it’s one thing not to like someone’s politics. It’s quite another thing to knowingly have in the workplace a proud, Nazi, anti-Semite. And I think most-

Ira Glasser:

Who’s supposed to decide that

Preet Bharara:

The employer, the private employer.

Ira Glasser:

Yeah. And if supposedly the employer is an Orthodox Catholic and decides that he saw somebody in a pro-abortion demonstration on Saturday and he hated that.

Preet Bharara:

I know that you are an absolutist on the First Amendment, and I appreciate that with respect to…

Ira Glasser:

No, I’m not being a absolutist.

Preet Bharara:

… public employers.

Ira Glasser:

I’m not being an absolutist, what I’m saying is…

Preet Bharara:

But it’s not necessarily the case. I mean look, if I said on this podcast the N-word in a pejorative way, I would expect Vox Media to fire me and I wouldn’t expect the ALCU…

Ira Glasser:

You mean in the pejorative way?

Preet Bharara:

Yes. Well, but that’s what I’m saying Ira, if I said it to a black person, meaning it as a slur, first of all, I would never say it under any circumstances, even in the context that you described, because I don’t think that word should come out of anyone’s mouth. Whether that should be prohibited legally, whether that should be a fireable offense, I leave to other people to decide. But my hypothetical is, suppose I use it in the worst way you can, in the pejorative to a guest on the show and I call that person the N-word. I would expect to be fired, everyone would expect me to be fired, my team would expect me to be fired and they wouldn’t expect the ACLU to run to my defense because it’s a private employer, and because of what I said, is that a problem or not?

Ira Glasser:

Yes. I think it is a problem. First of all, I think gets an illusion when you keep saying N-word. You think you’re not saying the word, but when you say N-word, everybody, that word that you say think you’re not saying you are saying, you’re just using an abbreviation for it. Everybody understands it. The word is in your head when you say N-word, the word is in the head of everyone who hears it. It’s delusional.

Preet Bharara:

With respect Ira, I think that’s a little silly. There are other ways I could make a reference to a thing that is not the thing itself. I could say, I don’t have to use the first letter of the word I could say, what if it’s the case that I use the worst slur that a black American can be called? Are you going to say that’s the same thing as saying the word because I’m referring to the nature of it so people understand what I’m talking about?

Ira Glasser:

How do you discuss the word without mentioning the word? How do you do that?

Preet Bharara:

Yes, but discussing the word by using the first initial of the word is not the same and have the same import and doesn’t have the same attack value, and doesn’t have the same disgustingness attached to it as using the word. Saying those are the same things I think is a little farfetched. They’re not the same.

Ira Glasser:

Well, I think it’s delusional to make that distinction. When you say, “F you,” what do you think people mean? It’s just a translation.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you should talk to the FCC about that because they have different rules for when people bleep. I’m allowed to be on the radio Ira, and I can say the F-word and they bleep it and you have the F and that’s fine. If they don’t bleep it…

Ira Glasser:

They sent Lenny Bruce to jail, Preet, they sent Lenny Bruce to jail for using those words.

Preet Bharara:

I get it.

Ira Glasser:

So don’t cite the FCC to me.

Preet Bharara:

I’m saying the law recognizes, and normal people recognize a difference between saying the full word and bleeping it. That’s not the same, is it?

Ira Glasser:

I think it is the same, I think it communicates exactly the same thing. I think when, when you say the N-word, everybody knows what you’re saying. It’s just like saying, You can’t say white, so I’ll say [French 01:06:40], I’ll use the French word instead. Everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll use a different analogy. I would find a Tarantino movie much less enjoyable if all the curses were bleeped, even though I know what they’re saying. It’s a different thing, it’s a different experience. That’s my view. You have your view. I have mine.

Ira Glasser:

Whether it’s enjoyable or not, it’s not the issue. The issue is whether the government can punish you for it.

Preet Bharara:

I’m saying it’s not the same, that the impact is different, and it’s not the same. The specialness of the First Amendment in our country and that actually settles a lot of this because as you have said, many times in the Skokie case, the law was very much on your side and the issue was the politics and the optics and people’s emotions about it. The other thing that was fascinating in the movie was the friendship that developed over time between you and William F. Buckley, with whom you disagreed, but he had you on firing line a lot. And you debated, and you took him to a baseball game, which is shown in the movie. He’s a guy who, unlike some other conservatives, didn’t care too much for sports and in particular didn’t know much about baseball. Was there ever a thing on which you think you shifted his view or he shifted your view? Or did you help each other refine your own arguments in some way?

Ira Glasser:

Well one of the reasons I took him to a baseball game, it’s the same reason I took him to Coney Island to Nathan’s for lunch one day instead of to a fancy restaurant in Manhattan when we met. And that was, is because my take on Buckley was that he was a very kind person in person. I was at his house a couple times for dinner and the way he treated, he had a Spanish cook and he was exceedingly kind, spoke to her in Spanish. My take on Buckley was that he lived in a bubble. He was a brought up as a very rich, isolated kid. I thought he never saw real people.

Ira Glasser:

So I took him to a ball game and I took him to Nathan’s in Coney island. And it might have been delusional on my part, but thought that if he had more contact with real people, the personal sympathies he showed for the people he did relate to would be reflected. I don’t know if that ever happened. I may have affected his position a little bit on drug prohibition, which we both opposed, but I think was leaning in that direction before we ever discussed it. He and I agreed on a number of free speech issues, but 95% of the time that I was on his show, over the years, we were on opposite sides. And he was graceful about it, he like debating it, but it was a little bit more of a game for him than it was for me.

Preet Bharara:

There was more performance in it for him.

Ira Glasser:

I think so.

Preet Bharara:

He was a TV guy and you were actually overseeing the litigation of cases in court.

Ira Glasser:

Yeah. And I was in the movement, I was fighting for people’s rights. It was not okay to me that people took some of the positions that they did. I once was invited dinner at his house in Stanford, Connecticut, very fancy place, right on the water. And I come walking in a few minutes early coming up from Manhattan and was greeted by his wife who I had never met at the time. And she was very gracious and said, “Oh, I’m so glad to meet you after time. But tell me, Mr. Glasser, why are you so mean to Bill on television? And I looked at her and smiled and I said, “Well Pat,” I said, “He says so many terrible things. You really need to do something about that.”

Ira Glasser:

And it was that kind of a play action game almost but it was never a game for me. I always regarded myself as a warrior for social justice and for the rights of people who were vulnerable and subjugated. And while you debated people in polite terms in public, it was never just a play for me. And though we became close as adversaries, there was never a second when I wasn’t aware of that adversarial distance between us. And that was true of a lot of people I debated over the years. I mean, Jerry Falwell, the moral majority I debated, he was very friendly in person, but the things he stood for injured thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people and I was not about to be forgiving of that.

Preet Bharara:

I think the other thing that goes on in modern times is it’s not only the case that people disagree with each other and you or I might think that the person’s point of view is terrible, that often it’s the case the other person’s point of view is BS in the sense that they don’t even believe it.

Ira Glasser:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

That they’re making arguments, and there’s a lot of bad faith now.

Ira Glasser:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Whether it’s about Ukraine or it’s about religion or it’s about freedom or it’s about the coronavirus. At least my sense was when you and William F. Buckley were having a debate, he believed the arguments he was making and he was making them in good faith.

Ira Glasser:

Yes. I think that that’s correct.

Preet Bharara:

And you were too and there’s a lot less of that now, and it becomes very hard to like your adversary and respect them when they’re not only disagreeing with you, but disingenuously disagreeing with you.

Ira Glasser:

Well, I once debated back in the early ’80s, Jerry Falwell’s second in command in front of a large audience of, I don’t know, 1,200 people or so, and debating the moral majority’s position and versus the ACLU’s position on a range of issues. And when the show was over, we both all go backstage and the guy comes up to me and smiles, sticks out his hand and says, “Well, we gave them a great show, didn’t we?”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Ira Glasser:

And I had to restrain myself from just punching him.

Preet Bharara:

That goes beyond speech Ira. The punch is a step beyond speech.

Ira Glasser:

That’s right. The punch goes beyond speech but it is symbolic expression. It’s just not the kind of symbolic the First Amendment protects.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve been very generous with your time Ira Glasser, thank you for your service, thank you for your voice, and thank you for spending time with us.

Ira Glasser:

Well, thanks for having me, I appreciate it. These are issues always worth discussing.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Ira Glasser continues for members of the CAFE insider community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Susan Glasser and Ira Glasser.

Preet Bharara:

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @preetbharara with the #askpreet. Or you can call and lead me a message at (669) 247-7338 that’s (669) 24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. And the CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh and Namata Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.