Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we remember the past and just repeat it.

And there's no past more worth repeating than what it takes to fight off the cyclical rise of fascism every time they get brave enough to make themselves known.

So today we replay the episode we put together back in August 2017, immediately after the

Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.

And it focuses on the tension between the freedom of speech and those who would use that

freedom to legitimize their desire to

violently remove everyone else's freedoms. And so to look back with an eye on the present,

sources today include Watch It News, MSNBC, backstory, Vox, the Tom Hartman program, Slate,

Democracy Now, and the 1943 U.S. War Department,

which had some thoughts on how to not fall for fascist rhetoric.

The American Civil Liberties Union will no longer defend hate groups seeking to march with firearms,

a policy change that comes on the heels of protests by white nationalists and counter-protesters over the weekend in Virginia.

The newspaper quoted the ACLU's executive director saying in an interview that after violence during the Charlottesville protests,

judges, police chiefs, and legal groups will be required to look at the facts of any white

supremacy protests with a much finer comb. White nationalists stage day unite the right protest in

Charlottesville over plans to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee

from a park. A number of them carried weapons, according to witnesses and video. The ACLU's Virginia

branch defended the right of the white nationalists and neo-Nazis and others to rally in the

city that is home to the University of Virginia. For decades, the ACLU has defended rallies by such groups on the grounds that they have constitutional rights to free speech.

But some critics on both the left and the right say it's time for the ACLU to rethink how they defend the First Amendment. A recent op-ed in the New York Times argues, quote, sometimes standing on the wrong side of history in defense of a cause you think is right is still just standing on the wrong side of history.

Chuck Dodd spoke with the author of that critique, Kaysu Park.

Historically, we haven't achieved a democracy that protects all speech equally and freely, even if the first amendment has been applied to

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