This is the recent interview with Nick Gillespie, where I go deep with the artists, activists,

entrepreneurs, policymakers, and visionaries who are making the world more libertarian, or at least

more interesting, by champion free minds and free markets.

My guest today is Ben Wisner.

He's the deputy legal director at the ACLU, and he says that Donald Trump's second term has brought in all-out assault on free speech, targeting comedians, immigrants, universities, and even law firms that take the wrong cases.

We put Trump's actions in the context of past presidents, and we discussed whether the ACLU has strayed from the days of

defending the free speech rights of American Nazis in Skokie, unite the right protesters in Charlottesville,

and the National Rifle Association in New York State. We also discussed the legacy of Edward Snowden,

whom Wysner worked with, and whether things have gotten better since the

whistleblower revealed illegal mass surveillance of Americans. Here is the Reason interview with Ben

Weisner. Ben Wisner, thanks for talking to Reason. It's my great pleasure, Nick. Thanks for having

me. It is, you know, I want to talk about the ACLU as an organization, but I also want to dive into some really important cases that are going on in the culture, but then also that the ACLU is involved with or has been involved with recently.

And I guess let's, you know, let's take the threat

temperature level of Donald Trump in his second term to free speech. You know, we're,

maybe we're out of the, the heat of the Jimmy Kimmel moment and things like that. But how do you

rate Donald Trump at this point

in his second and possibly, you know, second of three terms as president, this type of thing?

How bad is he for free speech? Well, I started at the ACLU a month before the 9-11 attacks in 2001.

And I've seen no analog in the 21st century to the kind of threat matrix we see on the free speech front. I think the better analogies are McCarthyism

and even possibly the palmerades, because you see that they're using really the full power of

the state. They are sweeping immigrants off the street for nothing other

than their political speech and trying to deport them. They're using all of the funding power

...