Rising Up For Justice: Defending Rights and Dissent in an Age of Fascism

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FEATURING CHIP GIBBONS - Our nation and our world is overrun with billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power. 

This week, Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent  joins us. Defending Rights and Dissent is a national civil liberties organization that defends the American people’s right to know and freedom to act through grassroots mobilization, public education, policy expertise, and advocacy journalism. 

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: So, I gave a brief summary of what Defending Rights & Dissent does, but give us more background in terms of the kind of work that you're engaged in that gets more specific. What are the issues that are important to you and what is the main goal of the organization? 

Chip Gibbons: Well, I think the issue that's probably the most important to us is the right of the people to engage in political expression. Our organization has existed for six decades. It's actually the product over time of the merger of a number of smaller organizations. I will not bore people with an organization chart of this group merging to this group, but I will go back six decades ago briefly to note that we were founded as the National Committee against the House Un-American Activities Committee to take on the McCarthy era repression at a time when many people were afraid of speaking out because those who did, had their livelihoods destroyed, they were smeared, they were targeted. 

In the process of taking on McCarthyism, we angered another gentleman by the name of J Edgar Hoover. Hoover’s FBI, subjected us to ruthless surveillance. This came out in the mid-seventies, and, you know, with the demise of HUAC, we became very interested in defending political expression from government surveillance, both the FBI at the federal level, and what they used to call Red Squads, the police intelligence squads at the local level.