In this episode, I spoke with Nico Perrino, the executive vice president at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a non-profit civil liberties group founded in 1999 with the mission of protecting free speech on college campuses in the United States, and which has since expanded its efforts beyond campuses to American society in general. As I wrote in my previous post, Fire in the Belly, his organization is “one of the greatest institutions of American democracy.”
Nico is also the creator and host of FIRE’s So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, co-director and senior producer of the 2020 documentary “Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story” about the life and career of former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser, and was creative consultant on the 2015 film “Can We Take a Joke?” about censorship in stand-up comedy.
In this conversation, we talk about the First Amendment and its philosophical grounding, the ongoing pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests and the state of free speech at American universities, my firing from The Seattle Times and the state of free speech in American media, Ira Glasser, censorship in stand-up comedy, and much more.
FIRE's Nico Perrino wants to hear what you have to say